To SMART Board or Not to SMART Board

The dusty green chalkboards still inhabiting many classrooms across the country seem as archaic and worn out as the threadbare suede elbow patches on your English professor’s tweed blazer. Yet, like your instructor’s stubborn refusal to give up his trusty and musty old blazer despite the comings and goings of various more flattering trends, many schools are still obstinately clinging onto outdated chalkboards and whiteboards. Classrooms have long struggled with integrating technology into the education regime, but the invention of the SMART Board may change the technological dry spell that many schools are going through.

SMART Boards are interactive whiteboards that allow instructors to use a specialized stylus to move things around on a large screen. The teacher’s computer is projected onto the SMART Board’s screen, which resembles a large monitor, and the teacher can use the stylus to drag and drop things, select things, and do other actions that are similar to the actions of a touch-screen computer. Invented in 1991, it took years for schools to warm up to the idea of having a SMART Board replace common chalkboards and whiteboards. Today, more than 900,000 classrooms have one of the devices at their disposal, according to The Katy Times. Clearly, the technology has been a big hit with many schools.

Teachers and students have praised the SMART Board for its ability to make lessons more interactive and fun. The novelty of seeing the device in action leads to greater class participation and even coaxes some of the shyest students out of their shells to join in on the game show-like quality of the SMART Board. Teachers for young students can use the equipment to create educational games, like having select students drag the shapes of states onto the correct places on a blank map to teach students about geography. Training to use the board has proven easy as well, with many teachers able to create lesson plans around the device soon after learning how to use it.

Yet, the SMART Board’s novelty effect may lose its punch after students become accustomed to seeing it. It remains to be seen whether the technology will retain the interest of students throughout their entire educational career, or whether it will just become as mundane as a regular whiteboard. Another negative aspect of the SMART Board is its hefty price tag; each board can cost up to $3,600, which is a lot to ask from schools at a time when many public schools are struggling with budget issues. Certainly, SMART Boards can be a great educational resource to help reinvigorate student interest in learning, but it cannot replace good lesson planning and teaching skills. However, if a school has the means the invest in the equipment, it will undoubtedly make learning a lot more fun for its students. 

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 9:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.