SmartBoard Lesson Reflection

As I was doing my SmartBoard assignment, I was much more excited about it than I was the PPt one.  I love interactive teaching and had been wanting to learn how to do a SmartBoard activity and was really nervous about it and being able to do it right.  I had originally wanted to do a math lesson, but the more I worked on it, the more I realized that I wasn't that interested in what I was doing.  I like more hands on, manipulative-type activities for math.  I started to think about what could be considered "non-interactive" subject matter, and I decided that the Civil War is something important to teach, that most teachers do through books, hand-outs, and other reading based activities.  My topic was found!

I tackled too much however, and my activity became too much to do in one day.  Unfortunately I didn't realize this until my classmates pointed it out to me.  Oh well, live and learn right?  At least I can take what I've done, edit it, and space it out to use as the base for a unit plan.

I have to say that I love the ability to move objects around on the board, but I have to remember to lock items that I want to remain stationary.  I remembered to do this on pages where moving multiple items was necessary, but forgot on others where I only needed to move one or two objects.  I feel that I made good use of this ability when I made my "Secession from the Union page" and my "Creating West Virginia" page.  These were some of my favorite pages because I feel that the creation of the Confederacy is a fairly abstract topic for kids, so this was a way to make it a little more concrete.

I was also reminded to take font size into consideration.  I had planned on having a chance to test my presentation out in an actual classroom before sharing it with the class, but time is not always in my favor and I found myself trying to get into locked rooms.  At least when I have my own classroom I can  just stay late or come in early and test these out before lesson time.

I think that I will use this lesson as a base if I get a job where the Civil War is part of my curriculum.  I will spread it out though, and take more time with the material.  I would make sure to spend more time on the key players, Harriet Tubman especially since she is a personal favorite of mine.  I took more time and put in more effort with this assignment and I think it showed.  I still need some polish, but this was much better than before.