Smart board "aha"

Technology is a little overwhelming in my classroom at Nathan Hale.  It is not the technology itself it is just the new applications of it and the disparate manner all the technologies work together.  There is the Smart board, the doc cam, and the desktop computer.  The Smart board is something of a blank slate as it is new this year to Hale so everyone is getting up to speed and  I am as proficient as almost anyone.  In my alternate middle school experience I was assigned a teacher who uses technology similar to Smart boards: Active board.  There have been multiple “aha” moments while watching my middle school cooperating teacher, who has fully integrated the Active board into her lesson plans.
One involved the warm-up.  She presents the warm up on the Active board rather than the doc cam.  This may seem small but it has advantages.  First, there is no paper involved and this is big because at the end of the day we are swimming in paper in my Nathan Hale classes.  Second the use of the Active board allows you to post the problem and create a markup layer when you go over it.  When the next class starts you simply delete the mark ups and start again.  With the doc cam you need a fresh copy of the problem for each time you go over it.  I lean toward working out a problem on the board, rather than the doc cam; perhaps this reveals a traditional style of teaching in my approach.  A  real traditionalist might point out that you can just post the problem on the white board, work it out on the white board (erasing each solution), and achieve the same results as all the technology.  The time savings of keystrokes over writing and erasing may be small but I think they add up.  Another advantage of the technology over a more traditional approach is that you can save your problems and solutions to build into your curriculum the next year and you are not swimming in paper.  The bigger promise however is the potential to work in any number of other supporting media to the problem, be it a TI-84 emulator to an internet based applet.  This is an “aha” moment I want to develop.