Key Learning Moment

The decision to design an interactive smart board lesson enabled me to develop my skills within this program. Using smart board technology enables the students to engage and interact with their learning. The Smart notebook program allows for the integration of multiple technologies to be displayed and presented to the class through one medium. It incorporates video with sound, typed presentation with the ability to select and control the presentation from the projected picture. The decision to use Smart Notebook over another similar program such as PowerPoint was my need and desire to learn new technologies. From creating my interactive lesson, I have learnt that the software has its own limitations, as for an example, for video insertion you can only display .flv file formats, unlike PowerPoint you can insert many different video file formats.  

When comparing the two similar programs, I found that smart notebook would often have glitches, such as freezing and not run as smoothly when trying to operate functions such as games, or video clips.

These issues made the completion of my project very time consuming, and frustrating. As much as I believe in the idea of interactive lessons where students can touch the screen to answer questions, some of the negative aspects and issues outweigh the positive theory behind it.  If I were to develop a similar lesson again, I would just use PowerPoint, as I found you could do similar things without the timely frustrations.

One key learning moment during the designing and producing of my smart board lessons was the applications that you can add to web browsers such as Google chrome. The application I used was the one that lets you download Java application and games, it is fantastic. As I no longer needed to hyperlink a screenshot of the educational game for my lesson, I could insert the educational game directly into my Smart board interactive lesson.

This key learning moment, opened a world of opportunities with different application programs.

The design decision made to include the interactive game was to engage students in their learning, and by trying to make a game out of it, students can achieve some enjoyment from learning.

By being able to include quizzes as a part of my design I was able to fulfil many elements of the Quality Teaching Model. Elements such as student engagement, deeper understanding, higher-order thinking and student self-regulation are all addressed when using and operating this lesson.