Back to Basics:  the Slate, Well . . . and a Projector/Computer

Diana Solomon, Media Specialist/Computer Teacher
St. Andrew's School
Savannah, GA

Remember the song “School Days, School Days”?  The music was by Gus Edwards and the lyrics by Will D. Cobb. (http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/lyrics/schooldays.htm)

It was popular in 1907 in the one room schoolhouse where my grandmother taught.  The lyrics have come full circle one hundred years later, “and you wrote on my slate ‘I love you so’ when we were a couple of kids.”  After seeing the virtues of the Airliner Smart slate modeled and extolled, I had to get my hands on one to make my classes even more interactive.  Class periods fly by fast enough without waiting for students to come to the board.  Now the slate comes to them.  Advantages: 1) Teacher proximity - remember those Fred Jones classroom discipline tips?, 2) Student hands-on interactivity, and 3) Increased student attention and focus.

The first tentative step was to use the built-in game templates with the Notebook 10 software under the Lesson Activity Toolkit so student teams could play pre and posttest terminology reviews.  We tried out Word Guess, a techie version of hangman that is easily made while supporting alternate views of a tomato splat, or basketball and soccer goals.  For more in-depth questioning under Activities, there is a multiple choice template that allows for quickly generated questions and answers.  Preparation for our computer exit exam was much more fun this way.

The slate is also a nice replacement for the old laser pointer.  Why point when you can circle perfectly via the magic pen or notate with different colored ink!?  Yes, Power Point and others have that within their programs but the slate is not limited to any one program.  Besides, walking around the room while accessing various websites (bluetoothed to 52 feet) and giving information a little boost with an underlining or circling is fluid to the teaching and discussion.  Even the capture of lessons with notes and voice for playback looks interesting but not particularly applicable to me at this point.  Though lessons repeat, students’ needs, awareness, and abilities make flexibility important in the course of teaching.  So, recording what worked with one group can be stilted or stale with another.

Only the tip of the iceberg has been discovered for the possible uses and perks surrounding this little 32 ounce tool and I look forward to discovering more.  Our technology skills and media skills for grades one through six lent themselves nicely to the slate but any other subject would benefit equally as well.  I’ll write on my slate “I love you so” and so will more than a couple of kids.

Airliner: http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Products/AirLiner

Using the Lesson Activity Toolkit:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J6W4AXHN9c

                                                          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSOUL8qLcoA

Kudos to a number of very inspiring sessions at the conference that used Airliner and InterWrite slates, particularly Jason Williams, Matthew White, and Rod Hames in their respective sessions.

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