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Managing equipment and teaching aidsIn today?s age there are many different types of teaching aids that teachers can use to help gain the student?s interest and to help motivate students. A teaching aid is a tool that teachers use to help illustrate or reinforce a fact, skill, idea or lesson that they are teaching. Teaching aids also help to motivate students because it makes the activity or lesson more fun and entertaining. For the equipment being used and the teaching aids to be beneficial the teacher must know how to use them and they must be prepared when problems arise. There are lots of items that can be considered as teaching aids but the few that I will look at are the black board, overhead projectors, and smart boards.
Blackboards are one of the most common teaching aids. Blackboards are beneficial for students because they are easy to read of off, they provide visual interest, and there is not much preparation for teachers. When using a blackboard make sure that the board is clean (no smudge marks) and that there is chalk and a chalk brush available for when you need to use the blackboard. Not much can go wrong when using a blackboard which is one of the benefits of using it as a teaching aid, one of the negatives about backboards is that you have to have neat writing for the students to be able to read it, if you have a lot to write it can be very time consuming, and you cannot save work on the backboard.
Overhead projectors are a great teaching aid because teachers can display the information that they want students to see at the front of the class. With overheads it is important to do some prep work before hand. You need to have your information printed/photocopied on transparencies in advance, you should set up the over head at the correct distance away from where you want the information projected, plug in the projector and make sure it is still working and that the bulb is not burned out. One of the advantages of using an overhead is that it is portable to it can be moved from one class to another and you can also keep the transparences for other lessons or always show it again if you need to refer back to it. A disadvantage of the overhead projector is that it requires a power supply so if you are in a country where that is not available then you cannot use the overhead projector as a teaching aid; it also requires more maintenance than a blackboard would need.
Smart boards are interactive whiteboards that allows you to use digital pens which then project the writing on the whiteboard. The advantages of smart boards are a fabulous teaching aid for teachers because they can display lots of information and be very visually appealing. For smart boards there is a lot of prep work that is needed in making sure that you have your lesson planned and organized. There are many advantages with using the smart board but in order to prepared for all of them you have to feel comfortable with the technology that you are using and test it out before the day of your lesson, and this is not even a guarantee that it will work. The disadvantage of the smart board is that it is so technological that there could be a lot of technical difficulties. The smart bored consists of an interactive whiteboard, a computer, and projector, and white boarding software and for everything to run smoothly all of these components must run simultaneously. Another disadvantage is that smart boards are very expensive and for all classes to have one would be very costly.
Teaching aids have certainly evolved with the use of technology. The three teaching aids that have been mentioned above are all very useful teaching aids but depending where in the world you, what your resources are like, and what your classroom offers will depend on which teaching aid you are able to use. In certain countries a blackboard is all the school can afford so it is important to make good use of the teaching aids that you have available to you. Whether you have a blackboard or a smart board to use it is important to make the most out of the teaching aids that are available to you.
