We have a SMARTBoard.
It is glorious. Amazing. Fantastic.
It has all these cool interactive charts we could use for our calendar, lunch counts, and math meeting stuff. That would be really, really cool. But we like to use our SMARTBoard for other reasons.
We use our SMARTBoard to connect with other people all over the world. We talk with them, read what they have to share, and share what we have to say too.
Today we started wondering about space because some of our tweeps on Twitter shared their learning with us. It really got us thinking. We wondered how people get information about space if we can't live there or go to some far away places. We ended up watching a video from nasa.gov about a Mars Rover and the Apollo 12 mission. It was so quiet in our room you could have heard a pin drop.
Sure, we could have read about this in a book. Sure, Mrs. Overman could have created a document in her SMARTBoard Notebook files to share with us tomorrow. But she didn't. She just ran with what we were curious about.
We watched the video from NASA. We shared what we learned with our friends.
And we got some new wrinkles in our brains.
Teachers take risks when they choose to teach in the moment. Learning about a Mars Rover wasn't in Mrs. Overman's plan book for today, but it was worth the risk to teach it anyway.