The Importance of Standardized Software and Why SMART Learning Suite

Being a teacher today very much means preparing our students for the future. The world we live in has undergone major changes during the last few decades. We can't teach in the same way as we did before. We have to help our students develop competences within various areas so that they can become responsible global citizens. That is why we need good classroom technology.

My name is Gerd Söderlund and I am a Swedish-speaking Finn who have worked as a teacher for about twenty years. My students are also Finland-Swedes. I teach English and Finnish as foreign languages. My school, Cronhjelmskolan, is a junior high school located on the west coast of Finland, about 500 km from Helsinki. There are 250 students in my school.

In Finland we have very recently rewritten both the national core curricula and our local curricula. The general education in Finland is thoroughly being reformed. From now on we  focus on seven different dimensions of learning or competences as they also are referred to. These competences will help our students become independent responsible global citizens. Dimensions that pedagogy focus on are cultural competence, multiliteracy, ICT competence, working and entrepreneurship and participation, empowerment and responsibility to name but a few of them. Quite a lot of competences to be taught and learned in our classrooms! We are also supposed to integrate different school subjects with each other more than we have done before and to have more formative assessments than summative ones.

We need good tools to achieve everything our new curricula want us to achieve. That's why I am so happy to have access to SMART Technologies' hardware and software in my school, because in my opinion they are perfect for teaching and learning, especially now when our classrooms are undergoing such big changes. It is so important to be able to work with tools that really inspire both us teachers and our students.

In my classroom I have access to a SMART board and a SMART kapp 84. There are also four more SMART boards in my school. Students love the interactive qualities of the SMART board and I strongly believe that it helps a lot of my students if they can use their whole body when learning something new. I often combine iPads and mobile phones with the SMART board when we do activities made with SMART lab or SMART Response 2. There are also four teachers, including me, in Cronhjelmskolan who use SMART amp in their classes.

The pedagogical benefits of SMART Learning Suite are tremendous. You get several great tools, SMART Notebook, SMART amp, SMART Response 2 and SMART lab activities in one package! And you can combine them if you want! It has never been easier for me to create engaging and interesting lessons, lessons that I can save and use over and over again.

In Notebook I get a personal touch on my presentations with all the different pens, stamps, and all the objects I can insert in various ways. Lab enables gamification in my classroom. In only a few minutes' time I can add my own content into the gamebased activities. Can learning be more fun than this? I have two favorite lab activities: Shout It Out and Monster Quiz.

Thanks to SMART amp I can collaborate and create workspaces across time zones and country borders with other teachers in the world. The 'anywhere, anytime' access makes it simple for me to follow the students' projects and I can give them feedback at the same time if I want. My school is this fall starting up a global collaboration project called Bridging Cultures together with four schools in the US and one in Canada. My students are super excited about this!

I can't  imagine a school day without SMART hardware and software. It has become such a big part of my lessons and it makes both teaching and learning diversified in many fun and interesting ways. SMART helps me catch my students' attention in the classroom. It feels great that my students fancy SMART Learning Suite's different tools, and for me, as their teacher, it is priceless to watch them enjoying their learning process!