Using the Smartboard in Your Classroom

Using the Smart Board in Your Classroom

Luise Strange de Soria, Ph.D.

Today we will cover the following topics…

Giving your Lecture using a Smart Board
Saving your Smart Board Lecture as HTML
Putting it all together
How Your Students will be able to use the pages
Advantages to using the Smart Board for Lecturing

Using the Smart Board during your Lecture

double click on the icon to open the software

(a blank screen with sidebars will open)

select a pen from the tray & press gently to write / draw on the board

(words / pictures show up on the screen wherever the pen touches it)

to add another slide, click on "blank"

(a new blank page will appear small copies of your pages show up on the right sidebar)

continue to write / draw and add pages as needed

(up and down arrows will appear by the small pages once there are around 8)

to go backwards / forwards to a page in the lesson, simply click on the small drawing of it on the right sidebar (the larger image in the center of the board will change to whichever page you have indicated)

Saving as HTML

Once you are done with the lecture, save it as a smart board file first

(select file, save, then name your file)

Next, to save as an HTML file, choose that option on the file menu

(A series of questions will follow, noted below)

1^st it wants to know where you want to save your file on the server…you can see I've put mine on the G drive in a folder called training with a folder presentations with a folder called smartboard. (G:\training\presentations\smartboard) To continue, click the next button…

2^nd it needs you to provide a name for the page. If you have already saved the file as a SMART board file, the program defaults to the same name. If you choose to use another name, simply type it, then click Next….

3^rd You need to select your screen size for the pictures on the web. I usually use 400 x 300. Then click Finish…

4^th Your last request is to publish the files on the web, so click Next…

5^th Select the server. It shows you the address in the screen below…(I don't usually change this, as Ken has it set up to the server where it needs to go), so just click Next…

6^th the last step is just to click on the Finish box…

7^th…it tells you that you have successfully saved your file! Click OK…

Once you have answered all of the questions, you will have a page with the name of your file (sample.html) and a folder with the same name (sample). On the left you can see the folder (sample) in the smart board folder under presentations, under training. On the right, you can see the SMART Notebook file (188KB) and the web page sample (2KB)…NOTE: this is the page that you will link so that your students can view the lesson via the web…

The address for the web page will therefore be: http://www.gpc.edu/~lstrange/training/presentations/smartboard/sample.html

The folder sample contains several subfolders, one for each slide that you made during the lesson.

Putting it all Together

To make your lesson web accessible , one way is to have a main "smart board" page

(see example at http://www.gpc.edu/~lstrange/2641smartboard/fa02/smartindex.htm)

Add the lesson title or number to your "index" page
Highlight the words that you want to link, then click on the link icon in the toolbar across the top of Netscape Composer

(a box called character properties will come up asking which file you want to link to)

Click on Choose File (a box called link to file will come up and allow you to search for the file that you want to link to…you can see here that the html file sample is highlighted)

Select the HTML page of your lesson, then click Open

(just prior to clicking Open, your screen should appear as above)

After you've clicked open, the name of your file should appear in the white line below the Choose File button. This area now says sample.html. To finish, click OK.

(the box will disappear and your page is linked)

How Your Students will be able to use the pages…

Type in the http address that the sample.htm file is linked. For example, ours will be at the following address… ….http://www.gpc.edu/~lstrange/training/presentations/smartboard/sample.html
In Netscape, click on your lesson title (this will bring up the Page Sorter View showing small images of the first 12-16 slides of your lesson)

If you want to view a slide at the end of the lesson, use the scrollbar on the right side of the screen (you can scroll down until the last set of slides show up on the screen)
To view a page, simply click on it

(a larger image of the page will appear in the large box)

To move from page to page, use the arrows at the bottom of the screen

(the images will change as the arrow is clicked)

To print a slide, click on the slide, then the print icon

Advantages to using the Smart Board for Lecturing

Allows you to go back to the beginning of the lecture (or just one slide) to show review concepts, or let a student write down something they missed
Allows for easy incorporation of other programs into the lecture
Instructor can remain in front of the classroom while giving lecture instead of behind the computer while trying to use the mouse to run the computer
Saving the files and making them accessible to the students via the web lets them have access to the lecture if they weren’t able to come for some reason, or if they want to use the problems to review
Resource of problems through the years for student to work on