Smart Board or interactive white board in Kindergarten

I don’t know where the money comes from, since they keep talking about budget cuts and larger class sizes, and fewer teachers, but in the last two years, every teacher in our school has received, 1 Smart Board, 1 Elmo (document camera), 4 student computers, one laptop, and over the summer they installed new projectors to the wall over the Smart Boards and a classroom sound system.  I love the technology, but when they keep talking cuts, where is it coming from?  And they didn’t think the Smart Board installations out when they first put them in.  First some of us had boards on wheels, then they took all of them out and brought new ones in and mounted them on the wall.  But teachers weren’t allowed any input on where they were mounted.  Then they had wiring issues with the projectors and the Smart Boards, so that’s why they mounted new projectors on the wall.  I would bet that wall mounted units/projectors wouldn’t have been anymore expensive than doing it over this way.

And the boards for primary grades are mounted to high.  They are primarily intended as interactive white boards for student use, but kindergarten kids can’t reach that high.  I was looking at some choir risers that had two steps, but the cheapest ones I could find would have cost me over $450.00 delivered.  For that, I decided to build my own.  While at Lowe’s looking at the materials my wife and I found these work steps for painters, they were each originally 20 inches high.  I cut one down to 16 inches and the other  down to about 8 inches.  It worked out so that the smaller one actually interlocks with the taller one.  All finished, it cost me about $80.00.

I Teach K Conference – Las Vegas

Well, I’ve spent the last two days and will spend the rest of the week at the I Teach K Conference in Las Vegas.  I have managed to attend 6 out of the last 7 annual  conferences.  They are always exciting and enjoyable.  Most of the speakers do a really good job and there are lots of great ideas shared.  And the vendors booths are just evil, tomorrow I need to leave my wallet home……

I think the most affirming thing about the whole thing is just being around so many other people who teach kindergarten, meeting them and sharing how things are different and how they are the same, all over the country.  I had one session and several more sessions scheduled for tomorrow about using an interactive white board in kindergarten.  The two main products are either a Smartboard, or a Prometheus board.  I think I want to do a post or two on using them in Kindergarten, but I’ll wait to see what I get out of tomorrow.

Technology in the Classroom

I use a lot of technology in my classroom. I have a sound system with an Ipod dock, an Ipod, a scanner, an Elmo (document camera), a projector, six computers for student use two laser printers, and a Smartboard (interactive whiteboard).  I use a laptop computer and the Elmo with the projector.  One of the printers, the laptop, the scanner, the sound system and Ipod, and the projector are my own personal items.  The projector has been giving me problems recently.  I dropped it a couple of years ago and it has worked OK ever since, but recently it has developed some issues.

Technology is only good when it works.  It can be very frustrating when you have to reboot the computer several times, unplug and plug the projector back in several times and turn it off and on several time all just to be able to do the calendar.  Meanwhile, 30 little bodies get more and more restless.  I was fiddling with it the other day and muttering under my breath and  the kids wanted to know what I was saying, (I didn’t tell them what I WANTED to say but) told them that the projector was just having problems because it was getting  old.

Without missing a beat, “You mean like you teacher?”  And they wonder why I hate (not really) them……………………. 

M.L. King Day

We were doing calendar on the SmartBoard this morning.  I have the numbers for all school days on the calendar in black and the weekends and holidays in red.  One of my kids noticed that the 17th of January was red. She asked, “What is M. L. King?” So we had THAT discussion.  Which got into SO many things.  Prejudice, slavery, inequality, on and on, and then we had to talk about where Dr. Martin Luther King fit into all that.  They had no concept of slavery, and after slavery the continued prejudice that has existed.  It was compounded by the fact that 24 of my 32 kids are Hispanic and many of them have limited English vocabularies.  So we had to keep defining our terms as we went along.  I have 4 African-Americans in my class.  When we talked about how slavers caught people in Africa and brought them here and sold them as property, I stopped and asked the class if they knew what an African-American was.  “Who are the people in the United States that are African-Americans?” 

They didn’t know.  Not even the African-Americans.  Finally I had one of my African-American students stand up, and one of my lighter Hispanic students stand up side by side.  I asked the class, “How are these two kids different?”  Here’s what I got.

“Casey is shorter than Samantha.”

“Samantha’s clothes are different.”

“Their hair is different.”

“Their shoes aren’t the same.”

“Casey has barrettes in her hair.”

Nobody saw color as a difference.  I finally had to ask them about color.  They they finally said, “Well, yeah, Casey had darker skin than Samantha.”

Kids don’t see color,  they are taught it.  Wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if they never learned about “color”  of for that matter any other ways that people marginalize others?

We can learn a lot from kids.  Yeah, they aren’t perfect, in fact, they drove me nuts today.  But this discussion was wonderful.

Sometimes some of the best things we teach or learn in a day aren’t even what we started out to teach or learn.

My SMARTBoard

Have I mentioned here how much I LOVE my SmartBoard?  We use it for Calendar in the morning, for Language arts and for Math in the afternoon.  One of the things that has really helped my kids with their scores on the Nonsense Word Fluency test in DIBELS is a page I made with some random letter “dice”.   Almost every day we do CVC words using three dice, two that generate random consonants with one in the middle generating random vowels.  We practice sounding out what ever comes up.  Only occasionally do I have to quickly change the result when it’s inappropriate.  they are getting too good though and sometimes catch the word……….

 Last time we did the Nonsense Word Fluency we smoked it as a class.

I would have a hard time giving up the board, it’s become such a part of the way I teach.  And the principal told us today that next year we will all have Elmo’s in our rooms.  Between the two, I think it will be great.

Money

We were talking about math this morning  and how important being able to count was.   This came out of our calendaring activities on the Smart Board where we add a penny for every day in school.  We are getting close to 100 days and  so we have a bunch of coins up there.  As part of our discussion I said that if they couldn’t count money, then I could trick them out of all their money.

One kid  laughed, her reply, like it solved everything…….. “We don’t have any money…..”

Not quite there yet…..

Technically I’m on break, but I’m not quite free yet.  My principal required us all to turn in our lesson plan books for her to look at while we are out.  I had to make sure everything was in order, I had one week I hadn’t done written plans.  Both our reading program and our math program have “pacing calendars” that we have to follow, so the plans aren’t a really big deal……unless they want to look at them…… With all the teacher’s guides and the things they don’t want us to deviate from, I sometimes wonder why we write plans the way they want them in the first place, at least with all the little procedures and objectives, I mean, they are already there for the most part in the guides.    I usually build my plans either off of the previous week or the previous years plans, or a combination of the two.  With all the cutting and pasting on the computer, I found a bunch of little things I hadn’t changed.  Got it all fixed, at least as good as it’s going to get and turned them in today.  Just have a little work left to do straightening out the room and I’m done.

  Since I was working at school today, I was there, but didn’t attend the staff meeting, but I heard about it.  Apparently she got upset when half of her staff got up half way through her meeting and went  out for playground duty.  Go figure.  Who put them all on the duty and then scheduled the staff meeting at that time in the first place?   She was talking about a parent night that is coming up and she wants Smartboard demonstrations for the parents  on all grade levels.  I’m thinking, great, SHOW all the  nice expensive technology so the school can get ripped off.  Since not all rooms have Smartboards, the principal was talking about having other teachers use the rotation out teachers boards when they go out on break.  I don’t think she’s really thought that through.  Someone wants to take it into their room and only use it for three weeks?  Or they get it and when we come back we don’t?  That’d be crazy.   Maybe after using one they wouldn’t want one, but I think most people would love it.  I can’t imagine going back to teaching without one.  So how is everyone going to feel when they have to give them back?  The other thing is that she only gave ONE Smartboard to Kindergarten.  I have it.  I’m on break.  Since I don’t really want to have it taken out of my room and “shared” and since she really didn’t plan ahead with this,  I’ve really packed up all the parts all over the room.

That probably wasn’t necessary, after all, half the cables are mine, the sound system is mine, the laptop is mine, the projector is mine……  All I had to do was take MY stuff home, so it wouldn’t walk off out of my room.  (which has happened in the past, come back from break and try to find your personal stuff that someone has helped themselves to) What they are left with is one Smartboard, and that’s pretty much it.  Good luck with that.  They bought the boards, but not all the stuff you need to go with them.

Sometimes they aren’t very “with it”.  They had an annual count day awhile back and adjusted the teacher assignments across the district base on actual enrollment.  We lost  two or three teachers, which meant classes needed to be consolidated.  Mostly, people got moved around from school to school. Forunately I don’t think anyone lost their jobs.   But they now  have to redo all the schedules every time the rotation changes.   The consolidation has been done for two rotations now, but nobody gets the actual specialist’s schedule until the first day back.  Which plays heck with all those lesson plans everyone is supposed to have done in advance.  Monday, the schedule is in everyones mailboxes.  Big schedule changes for almost everybody.  So that means teachers have to go back in and change all their plans or the kids will miss their special classes and the teachers will miss their prep periods.  They’ve known for WEEKS that they needed the schedule done, and it might have been, but they didn’t get it out until yesterday.