Previous experience with a SMART Board: doing a presentation on behalf of ProQuest at a school or library; and bumping or touching the screen unintentionally. Most of the time my reaction was, "oh cool, I didn't know you could do that". Some of the time, I had to ask someone to reset the board for me so that I could continue with my presentation.
Last Tuesday, I had the good fortune to be able to attend a SMART Board training session in the collaborative learning lab in the Murray Library at the University of Saskatchewan. The instructor introduced the basic steps to get the SMART Board up and running and how to interact with the board in a very general sense. A major portion of the session was for hands-on activities, giving each person a chance to interact with the technology and try and answer the question that the instructor had posed. I enjoyed the opportunity to test the technology and interact with the SMART Board intentionally!
After the session - a nagging question remains... although the SMART Board is incredibly fun for the instructor; what is the best way to utilize the technology so that students can also participate? I suspect that a SMART Board is not as useful for a library demo utilizing traditional pedagogy in which the instructor is spewing knowledge and the students are simply receptacles of that knowledge. Instead, the SMART Board is likely designed for collaborative sessions where the student and the instructor are both actively participating and interacting with the technology directly.
Elementary schools have had SMART Boards for years - perhaps I need to go on a field trip and see how they are being used!
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