SMART Notebook

Recently, I have been working in my education classes on STEM lesson plans. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. These lessons integrate all areas in one lesson plan and are extremely helpful in tying these concepts together in the classroom. I just made a lesson plan that involves SMART Notebook as my integrated technology. SMART Notebook is a great tool for getting students engaged in a lesson because it allows them to move things around and contribute unlike the traditional PowerPoint. SMART Notebook has a variety of ways to get students involved from an activity builder that allows students to categorize the pictures or words on the slide, different kinds of writing, and it also just gets students in front of the material and interacting with it. The focus in the SMART Notebook aspect of lesson planning is not just to use it as a PowerPoint with information on it, but to have activities that students can do that help them learn the material in an engaging way.

For my lesson, I was focusing on common core standard 4.NF.3a Understand addition and subtraction of fractions as joining and separating parts

referring to the same whole. I have a few different elements to introduce the concept with my students first such as a read aloud and a hands on activity, but then I have my SMART Notebook part of my lesson where I have students use the concepts they just worked with algorithmically. I have two slides of an algorithm represented by pictures with a place for students to fill in the numbers and two slides of word problems with pictures they can move around to help them solve it. The students had just used fraction circles with a partner to complete their pieces and make one whole. They won't really see what the algorithm has to do with the activity until they use the SMART Notebook and see the number sentence with the pictures. My hope is that when I teach this lesson, that students who are not at the board can also do this at their seat. It is interactive, but would also not be too complicated to transfer to their math notebooks.