This blog post was written by Kellie Campbell, a first grade teacher at Southfield Elementary School in Bibb County, Georgia. Kellie was ready to give up on teaching after her first year, but was reinspired when she saw the engagement that SMART software could drive in her classroom. She has just begun her second year teaching in Bibb County. 

Welcome to Did You Know?, a blog series dedicated to helping you maximize your use of SMART products with tips and tricks that you may not know about. We’ll regularly discuss new ways to leverage software and hardware to inspire greatness in the classroom. Read the last post here.

Have you ever heard of the SAMR model? Whether you learned about it once in college or you're an expert on it, it can play a key role in classroom technology integration. The SAMR model is used in classrooms all over the world whether teachers realize it or not.

When it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship, the memory of the moon landing still resonates. When we reached the moon in 1969, the men and women working in mission control were the same children who were in high school when President Kennedy announced his intention to get America there; that all happened in less than a decade. Everyone who contributed to the process didn’t just expand upon existing ideas, but they created a new reality entirely.

Welcome to Did You Know?, a blog series dedicated to helping you maximize your use of SMART products with tips and tricks that you may not know about. We’ll regularly discuss new ways to leverage software and hardware to inspire greatness in the classroom. Read the last post here.

Technology can help transform learning, but as numerous studies have shown, more technology in the classroom doesn’t automatically equate with better results. Most notably the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and John Hattie, Director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute have raised concerns that education spending does not equate to better outcomes. Getting the conditions right is vital for the success of today’s learners and teachers.

Welcome to Did You Know?, a blog series dedicated to helping you maximize your use of SMART products with tips and tricks that you may not know about. We’ll regularly discuss new ways to leverage software and hardware to inspire greatness in the classroom. Leave a comment below if there is something you'd like to read about here! 

Universities across Australia continue to embrace SMART Technologies, investing heavily in interactive technologies and new software across many faculties to  creating truly innovative learning spaces. Many universities have used SMART for a very long time, and today are upgrading to the newest options in order to give their students and educators the best, most reliable and connected experiences possible. 

For instance, a South Australia university with responsibility for a large cohort of Pre-Service teachers recently rolled out 4500 SMART Learning Suite (SLS) licenses to their staff and students, as well as certified one of their IT Leads as a SMART Certified Trainer to ensure that the staff have an expert at hand and that students can benefit from his knowledge.

In Queensland an entire Languages Faculty has been provided with new facilities including SMART interactive flat panels and the SMART Learning Suite. At a training session these language experts who were familiar with SMART Notebook were impressed with the range of learning options they now had with the SLS. As all students come to lectures with devices, being able to interact with those devices by sharing content, gaining  feedback to key concepts and collaborating in virtual learning spaces enables new ways to engage students. These lecturers are keen to bring gamification to their learning designs to motivate their students in the language learning experience.

In New South Wales, one university has also rolled out SLS licenses for students and staff in the Faculty of Education. This enables these students to develop digital content for teaching and learning which they can use in any school setting regardless of the school’s technology infrastructure. SMART is device agnostic and therefore the digital content and lessons the pre-service teachers develop can be utilized in their practicums. It will also enable these pre-service teachers to have tools for learning when they are employed in schools. 

In my last blog post, I talked about game-based learning and how to bring it to classrooms at scale. This time I wanted to differentiate gamification and game-based learning, and focus a little more deeply on why they are valuable in education.

During the Inspire Greatness Conference 2018 in Sydney this past September, I had the privilege of chairing the Executive Round Table held in the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery at Abbotsleigh School for Girls.