Smartboard French Lessons

Smartboard French lessons harness the power of technology to transform typical language lessons into interactive, multimedia presentations.

If you're lucky enough to teach in a school that uses SMART boards, you have many options for incorporating them into lessons, and many smartboard French lessons can be found online.

SMART boards are interactive systems that include a whiteboard, a projector, and a computer. They may be found in business, educational and many other settings. In educational settings, teachers run computer programs, which project images onto the whiteboard. A special set of markers enables students or the teacher to write directly onto the image projected on the whiteboard. The board then senses the special inks used in the smartboard markers, and can interact with the computer application. Smartboards can run on a wireless system, similar to the way laptop computers connect wirelessly to the Internet, or through a series of cable connections. Versions are available that run on Windows, Mac, Linux or other technologies; schools usually use either Mac or Windows versions.

Teachers who learned their art using traditional chalk, blackboard and books may wonder what benefit students gain from smartboard lessons. If you think back to basic educational theories, and to the three major categories of learners – auditory, visual and kinesthetic/ tactile learners – you'll recall that most people have a dominant learning style. Auditory learners learn best by hearing a lesson, while visual learners learn best through reading or seeing something. Kinesthetic and tactile learners need to directly engage in the lesson through movement or hands-on work in order to gain maximum benefit from the lesson.

Traditional classroom tools such as blackboards, notebooks and textbooks appealed primarily to auditory and visual learners. These students, for whom learning by hearing or reading came naturally, may have had an edge upon their peers who needed hands-on work. Today's new smartboard technology incorporates videos, movement, and interactivity. Students rise from their seats, go up to the board, and actually interact with the figures, exercises and lessons projected onto the whiteboard. This may appeal to the kinesthetic or tactile learner and help them engage more deeply with the subject matter.

Another benefit of using the smartboard is to add variety to the classroom setting. There are many ways to add variety to lesson plans: games, puzzles, group work, paired work, conversation, crafts, music and movies are some of the many ways to incorporate fun learning activities into the French classroom. Smartboards add yet another tool to the teacher's toolbox to make learning fun.

There are many sources of Smartboard lessons in French classrooms. The following resources provide various lessons, which may require downloading onto the computer used with your smartboard system. It's a good idea to download any content to a disk and run a virus check program on the downloaded item before transferring it to a computer.

• The Center School District provides smartboard French for high school grades and more. Although this website offers a mixture of many subjects, you can find French lessons in the high school section. Choose from among lessons on conjugating French verbs to French adjectives. There are also interesting lessons on culture and French-speaking countries.
• Longwood School District also posts dozens of smartboard lessons. French lessons begin in the middle school section.
• Medicine Hat College offers numerous French lessons for smartboard, PowerPoint and more.
• Educator Lynne Horn created a Dr. Who themed dictionary lesson. Students love responding like a Dalek, the evil robotic creatures in this sci-fi classic.
• Bob's Links contains links to dozens of smartboard lessons, including French immersion lessons and more.

Smartboards are fun and can add to the classroom experience, but they can never replace skilled teaching. Use them in conjunction with lessons, reading, conversation and other practices, and make your classroom a robust learning environment so that your students are speaking French fluently in no time at all.

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