The Need
Stephanie McCrummen of the Washington Post wrote an article, "Some Educators" and explained some of the reasons she believes schools buy smart boards. She says some schools buy them for the soul purpose of claiming their school is "innovative" and just as smart as the others who have smartphones. Schools sometimes buy them to keep up with the competition schools. a better way to stand out is to have good morality and pitch "our school does not need so called "smart" boards because we have smart teachers" instead of our school is innovative because we have blackboards that we can plug our computers into.
Pricing by Dell
I believe these new boards are not for every school. If a school can not provide books for every student to take home when it is necessary defiantly should not buy these boards. These boards prices average at $1,500 and cap around $7,000; it would be foolish to buy multiple boards if you do not have basic supplies while at the same time there is no actual purpose in buying one when there are more than one classroom in every school.
Does It Help?
In some cases students test scores did go up after a new smart board was introduced to the class. There were still a sufficient number of test scores which did non rise of remained the same. This is enough evidence to mark smart-board's claim to raise test scores void. It is proven that student presented with the new concept of a screen everyone can interact with by touch will pay more attention to lessons. This claim is true to some extent, psychologists have proven that students (especially middle level and under) response to new concept and objects. After these new objects are familiarized they will fall into the same boring category as everything else that used to be new such as, dry-erase boards, computers, etc. It only takes one to three weeks for something to become familiarized after that students will be falling asleep again until the next $1500 tool is presented. A better way to teach is to get students attention by connecting to their individual personnel or even their generations' interests. Repetitively buying short-term attention grabbing gimmicks does not seem like a good teaching method to me.
In some cases students test scores did go up after a new smart board was introduced to the class. There were still a sufficient number of test scores which did non rise of remained the same. This is enough evidence to mark smart-board's claim to raise test scores void. It is proven that student presented with the new concept of a screen everyone can interact with by touch will pay more attention to lessons. This claim is true to some extent, psychologists have proven that students (especially middle level and under) response to new concept and objects. After these new objects are familiarized they will fall into the same boring category as everything else that used to be new such as, dry-erase boards, computers, etc. It only takes one to three weeks for something to become familiarized after that students will be falling asleep again until the next $1500 tool is presented. A better way to teach is to get students attention by connecting to their individual personnel or even their generations' interests. Repetitively buying short-term attention grabbing gimmicks does not seem like a good teaching method to me.
That last paragraph really stood out to me. I hadn't thought of the boards in quite that way until I read your post. Great thinking!
ReplyDeleteNice use of pictures LOL. I agree that text books are more important than smart boards.
ReplyDeleteI liked your paragraph on pricing. I totally agree with all you said. Schools in poor financial standing should worry about meeting individual student needs rather than the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree when it comes to costs! If you can afford the basics, how can you afford the new billion dollar technologies we create every year.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I really liked how you set this blog post up. You broke it up in chunks with titles (very clever) so that the information wasn't all bunched up. The last paragraph gave a lot of awesome detailed information that would definitely help a school district decide whether they wanted to buy Interactive Whiteboards or not!
ReplyDeleteI thought you did a really nice job in writing this blog. I think that if the new whiteboards help at least one student increase their grades maybe they are a good product. But maybe not for the price that you are paying.
ReplyDeleteI agree that for some schools there are different priorities besides buying IWB’s. I am in field now and the school has a Smart Board in every classroom. Most of the teachers do not use the boards at all during the day and some aren’t set up correctly so they can’t be used. My issue is that they spent a lot of money on these boards that aren’t being used, but they do not have adequate books. Some classes don’t have Social Studies books. The class I’m in has Science books so outdated that they say things like “by the year 2000”. I believe a better use of resources would be in accurate and updated books over technology that isn’t even being used.
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