Smart Boards are a fun, hands-on addition to any classroom, from grade school all the way to the college level. With Digital Vision Touch technology, Smart Boards give students a chance to experience a variety of subjects with interactive lessons and activities. Smart Boards are particularly helpful for mathematics topics, turning otherwise-boring classroom time into a stimulating math adventure. For understanding challenging math concepts like fractions, you may find the Smart Board to be the next best thing to your teacher.

For Smart Board users, the Smart Exchange is a huge library of lesson options. The Smart Exchange is an online community where teachers and students upload and share the Smart Board activities that they’ve created, and in thousands of cases those activities are about fractions. For students in elementary-level math classes, the fraction activities on the Smart Exchange include bright graphics and easy-to-understand concepts so that you and your fellow students can truly see how fractions work. Some examples of highly-recommended elementary-level fraction activities on the Smart Exchange include Fractions for Grades 2-3, Fractions for Grades 4-6, Fun Fractions and Intro to Fraction Vocabulary (links in Resources).

In middle school, math can get a bit more complicated, especially when it comes to fractions. You may find yourself multiplying, dividing and otherwise manipulating fractions for a variety of hypothetical situations. High school takes fractions to even higher levels, and by college, math students could be using fractions in ways you didn't think possible. Fortunately, the Smart Exchange features hundreds of fraction-themed activities for older students who need a hand with the concepts. If you sort the Smart Exchange fraction catalog by grade to focus on secondary-level math and beyond, you can find lessons that include a Dividing Fractions activity, a resource called Equivalent Fractions and Simplifying Fractions, and even a Percent Jeopardy Game to help you enjoy learning about fractions’ alter ego, percentages (links in resources). Whatever aspect of fractions you find challenging, the many activities on the Smart Exchange can help.

Smart Notebook is the software that all Smart Boards use as the basis for the unique hands-on learning experience. For math classes, Smart Notebook offers an add-on software package called Smart Notebook Math Tools that can be very useful for fraction lessons. Specifically, Smart Notebook Math Tools includes a shape division tool that lets students cut shapes into parts, showing where fractions really come from. Other Smart Notebook Math Tools include shape manipulation, an advanced equation editor and many table and graph tools so that you and your classmates can interact directly with the software and have a more visual fractions experience.

All the lessons in the world don’t matter much unless you have a way to check what you know. Smart Response Interactive Student Response Systems are the best way to check your fractions progress with the help of Smart Board technology. With Smart Response, students use wireless number pads to type in the answers to quizzes and test questions that appear on the Smart Board. The students submit their results and the software quickly and easily tabulates the grades and generates a report that teachers and students can use to determine who needs more help, who really understands the lesson and which concepts are confusing for the class. Smart Response can help you find out how much you really understand about fractions, which means you can spend your precious time studying only what challenges you and not what you already know.