Fun Ways to Use Smart Board in a High School English Lesson
Coming up with ways to use Smartboard in high school English lesson activities is a fun challenge for the English teacher. Utilizing this technology provides more time and venue for students to showcase to the teacher and the class the progress that they make in comprehending lessons, especially those that require active, real-time feedback from the teacher. Here are some ideas:
Writer’s Tool
What better way to teach students the rules of the writing process than to demonstrate them yourself using your Smartboard. As you go through the stages of the writing process, model how you use organizational tools to systematize your ideas. Demonstrate this using the Smartboard so as to give students a head-start on how to take off in their writing. As you progress to the drafting, revising, and proofreading stages, make use of the Smartboard to show the class how proofreading and editing symbols are used on an actual draft (your own!). Use the highlighter feature of the Smartboard to draw attention to the areas that need editing and proofreading and to show examples of well-written phrases and sentences. Then, have the students demonstrate proper editing and proofreading themselves by calling on them toward the Smartboard.
Text Examination
Delving deeper into a literary piece that is rich in vocabulary and literary devices? Use the Smartboard to go through a short story page by page. As the class give life to the characters and make meaning out of the plot that these characters’ personalities created, rely on the Smartboard to project key passages and rich sentences for everyone to scrutinize. Start by encircling context clues to difficult words, highlighting literary devices used, and underlining important quotations and scenes that spell the turning points in the plot. Allow your students to participate in these activities by eliciting reactions and opinions from them AND making them share their thoughts by doing the encircling, highlighting, and underlining themselves.
Smart Brains by Smartboard
Working on the logical thinking skills of your students? Download an online newspaper, pick an article appropriate for the lesson, and together with the class, examine the logical reasoning and fallacies observed in the given writeup. Elicit meaningful supporting details of your students’ answers by having them use the Smartboard in identifying the logical organizations and fallacies pertained to. Do this repeatedly, especially in the opinion section of the e-newsletter or newspaper for the students to gain a richer bank of hands-on analyzing and criticizing.
The list of ways to use Smartboard in high school English lesson activities can be endless by virtue of this technology’s implications to the classroom. The use of Smartboard in the classroom encourages students to be an active participant in the learning process. Not all information flows from the teacher–the students themselves get to contribute to their own knowledge and skills enrichments by actually experiencing these learning activities. Such constructivist techniques are easily and readily accommodated by creating activities that enjoin and inspire them to try things out for themselves.