Week Five: Smart Boards And The Infinite Confusion

Smartboards: The Usefulness, The Frustration

I used a smartboard relatively frequently during my first placement, but it is safe to say that I never did more than absolutely scratch the surface of its functionality, using it primarily as a means of displaying computer programs on a screen for what amounts to a somewhat fancier version of a whiteboard, which are in and of themselves recent additions to classrooms. Exploring the functionality of a smartboard during class, I have to admit that I'm still less than expert in its use and expect that I'll be continuing to learn for some time how to use them properly.

I did, however, encounter some very useful little programs that could be valuable for either an Early Years or an early Middle Years placement, including programs that allowed you to place organs in their proper places on the body and an interesting interactive flash that allowed you to sample different parts of an orchestra, so you got a sense of how the different instruments contributed to a single piece. Certainly, there are no shortage of useful functions that one could accomplish with a smartboard given the prequesite skills and time to do so.

As a random aside, you know you're a hopeless nerd when you start playing around with dice rollers on the smartboard software and wish they had the full range of polyhedral dice, so you could basically play D&D on a smartboard ... which is neither here nor there as far as a classroom goes.

For all the power and functionality of the smartboard, however, there are some drawbacks. It is frustrating that the light markers can only be operated one at a time, and that the colours shift seemingly arbitrarily if you break that rule. There's no denying that it's easier to write on a whiteboard than a smartboard. I also worry about it being the best investment of preparation time as it often takes quite awhile to assemble instruction-worthy material on a smartboard, even at a limited level of functionality. Additionally, there is a frequent and disturbing trend to simply reduce already-precious whiteboard space for the smartboard's addition.

A Few Thoughts on Multimedia: 

When I was introduced to the concept of multimedia in the 1990s, it was primarily as something you viewed, something you watched or listened to that already existed, within a computer program or increasingly as the 90s drew to a close, on the Internet as well. Somewhere around the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, however, that began to change, marked by the emergence of YouTube in 2005 and continuing onwards into the present. Rather than simply being something that you watched, an experience that you took in passively, multimedia is now something you yourself can create, without specialized skills or expensive software.

This has had vast implications for our society, ones that are still making themselves felt as literally everyone in the world with an Internet connection can now become a creator and an artist. Thousands of people who previously had no means of sharing their creativity with the world can not only share their artistry, but also make a living from their art. In the year 2000, only a tiny few webcomics existed, and now there are countless thousands of them, with dozens of creators who are capable of supporting themselves on their art.

One of the most popular webcomics on the Internet, Homestuck, on www.mspainatadventures.com, is emblematic of the changing nature of artistic creation and expression on the Internet. Fuelled as much by Internet memes and its own fandom (about a million people read it daily) as by any traditional considerations of plot, it seamlessly weaves together images, animations, music and even short computer games into an epic that defies all simple categorizations of genre or even medium. Starting in 2008, the insane, brilliant mash of forms and mediums that constitutes this comic would have been inconceivable even five years before it went online.

The world of media creation is one that I haven't even dabbled in substantially. There are perhaps a dozen photographs of me that exist on the Internet, all of which were taken by other people. I don't own a scanner, nor have I ever used the camera feature on my phone. All of which would have marked me as pretty normal even a few years ago, but these days, smacks of Luddism that I don't really believe in. Hopefully by the time I am finished this course, I'll be empowered to branch out a little more into the world of multimedia and integrate both original and found content into the classroom.