SMARTboards

What is a SMARTboard you ask? A SMARTboard is an interactive whiteboard produced by the Smart Technologies. The SMARTboard is a white board that acts like your comptuer screen. If you are an educator and have no seen one of these you need to, they will change your feeling on education as a whole. But please make sure to be shown by someone who knows how to use the software or they can be a bit overwhelming and confusing. One blog group that I found is podcasting their lessons about using the SMARTboard every day is the SMARTBoard Lessons Podcast blog. This site offers many insites to the board and how it works. It is also nice that they include lesson plans that you can work straight off of in your own classroom. I know I will be keeping my eye on them in the upcoming months (even without a SMARTboard in my student teaching classroom).

Blogging Teachers

This is a list of my fellow classmates blogs. They were put together in the same fasion as mine with many more websites and different views on each subject we tackled together.

Jason

Angie

Angie's del.icio.us account

Traci

Sarah

Jacque

Math and Technology Integration

In my current 5th grade class I am working with students who are not able to reach the fifth grade standard. These students are currently working at a third grade level. The students will shortly start fractions. I found two websites that I believe I would use with my students to help them understand fractions. In this fifth grade class there is not the usual third grade materials, so computer will be a big help in teaching the students fractions. The first website I would use is Parts of a Whole. This website helps the students visualize the parts and wholes. I really like this because it helps in showing the difference between cutting the same amount of area into different number of pieces. After the students have a firm grasp on Parts of a Whole, I would use Visualizing Fractions to help them learn to make the fractions. This is a way for the students to be able to test their knowledge. I think that it is important for these kids to use the computer instead of physical manipulatives because this way they do not feel how far they are from their peers (by using third grade materials).