Get in Touch, Find Inspiration, Multiply Student Engagement

This is part 1 of 3 posts.

Yesterday, I attended a SMART webinar on "Get in Touch, Find Inspiration, Multiply Student Engagement: Create Technology-Enabled Learning Environments that Get Results" with Giancarlo Brutto.

I took about a page and a half of notes from this webinar that featured three different teachers and how they are using their SMART boards in their math classrooms. SMART board usage is going to be one of our primary goals next year in my building and I got some helpful ideas.  The first teacher who showed classroom examples was Michelle Meehan, a 7th grade math teacher at a middle school a couple of counties away from us.  Her school is a SMART exemplary school and I'm thinking I would like to contact her and maybe arrange a little teacher field trip next year!

Michelle uses lots of visuals and auditory cues to help her special education students.  She'll display problem on the board and then uses pictures and animations to help make better connections for her students and by creating interactive lessons she sees the students make the leap from concepts being abstract to more concrete.  She also very much likes using her airliner (the SMART slate) to walk around the room and make sure that everyone can hear when she's explaining problems and concepts.

Michelle is also starting to use the new additional math tools, (I'm not a math person, so this may be a very simple way of explaining this). She explained when she teaches area of a parallelogram she uses a tool that is able to cut off parts of the parallelogram and students see it becomes a rectangle and by using the formula for finding the area of a rectangle, they can then transfer that to finding the area of the parallelogram.  For a non-math person, I thought this was really cool! She also uses a tool (the shape division tool?) that allows you to break up a shape into different parts to help explain fractions.  You can then move around the broken shapes and show how they make up certain fractions.

The last thing Michelle explained was how she uses SMART Response remotes.  She likes them because she can get instant feedback from the students and how they are understanding the concept or problem being explained.  For example, she has students work on one-step equations and during the instruction can have students give feedback about their understanding and when everyone is comfortable move onto two-step equations without having to stop instruction.