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Hi guys, if you don't know me, my name is Samantha, and I am the owner of activity. Today, I am literally so excited to show you guys this awesome Smartboard.
This is called the HKMLC 55" Smartboard. This company sent me this Smartboard to give it a try and let you all know what I think. I was not paid for this review or anything like that. I'm here today to show you teachers or you homeschool parents how this Smartboard would be an awesome addition to your home or to your school, or to your classroom. I'm actually making three parts to this article because there is so much to go over.
I'm mostly going to be talking about all the different ways you can use this awesome Smartboard as a teacher, as a homeschool mom, and even as a business owner, too. So this is part one, let's go! First of all, look at at this thing, it's literally amazing! I love the size, it's the perfect size.
You can actually mount this to a wall. They include all of the pieces needed to mount this to a wall, basically like a television, or you can put it on a stand, too. I'm going to bring this down and show you guys the stand.
So here is the stand here. Um, they sent me this stand to go along with the Smartboard, and I absolutely love this stand because it is adjustable. So I made my Smartboard pretty short, actually, because I have a baby and a four-year-old and a six-year-old who love to use this Smartboard, and especially when I'm homeschooling, I need it nice and short for my four-year-old to do all of his activities on here. Um, so anyways, it's adjustable here, so I have it on kind of the middle level.
Um, you can raise it all the way up here, and actually the back arms here can make it even higher, and it can go even lower, too, which is pretty awesome. Um, I love that it has this little area here, too, because you can set anything here. Like, when I'm teaching my four-year-old, I like to set my water bottle here and any notes that I might need for the lesson. Anyways, there, this stand is amazing! It rolls extremely, extremely easily, and you can also, um, you can also use the brake on the stand, too, to keep it in place. I love that I can move this from room to room because of this stand. So I am extremely, extremely happy with this.
Next, I'm show you guys a little article of me putting the stand together. So the stand actually took me about an hour and a half to put together, but honestly, I am horrible at putting things together, so that's probably my own problem, but you could probably put it together in an hour or less. And if you have another person helping you, you can easily get it done within 15-30 minutes, I bet. Okay, so let's continue on with the little tour of the Smartboard.
So my favorite part of the Smartboard, besides the huge size that I absolutely love, are these pens here. So these pens are included with the Smartboard. The best part about them is that they are completely magnetic. You do not need batteries, which is always a pain whenever you have something that needs batteries, but these do not need batteries, so they are completely magnetic. They work fantastic! So here's the Whiteboard app, which I will get into a little bit later, but I just want to show you how great these pens work.
All right, I adjusted us a little bit over so the sun isn't too bad here. So anyways, let's continue. So I wanted to show you how these pens work. I love using them, so like I said, they are magnetic. My kids love to color on here. I'll show you a little article of them coloring.
"What are you guys doing?"
"Um, we're making shapes with like the computer."
Yeah, they have a lot of fun drawing on this Smartboard, let me tell you. And then you can also use your finger on here, too, which is great because I don't know if you lose the pens, which hopefully you won't, um, but if you do, you can just use your finger, and some teachers when they're teaching, they like to use their finger rather than their pen, so either way.
Another really cool feature is that you can actually adjust how thick it is when you write. So the thickness, so here's my name, and I can actually make it thinner if I'd like to. Down here we, we have the thickness, so we'll make it nice and thin for you to see. So there you go. You can also change the color. So I'm going to turn the thickness up so you can see, and we will change it to yellow, make you a nice star there. The kids obviously love this feature. It's really great when you're working with students, because when you're doing different worksheets or having them practice different writing activities, you can tell them to highlight something in a certain color or write something in a certain color. There's a lot of different uses for that.
The next thing that is included with this Smartboard is the remote. Here's a little closeup of the remote. There's a lot you can do. It's basically like a TV remote, so you can turn on and off the Smartboard with the remote, which I love that because sometimes it'll be across the room teaching, and then I can just click the on and off button. We have a volume button so you can easily turn up and down the volume, and by the way the speakers on here were extremely well, I'm really happy with it. There's also a mute button up here. It's basically like a regular TV remote which we all know how to run. So this is definitely awesome because other smartboards that I've worked with, they don't have a remote, and when you're across the room, it's just pretty awesome to have this so that you can turn on and off the Smartboard and also change slides if you're doing a PowerPoint. So really happy with this.
Another thing that they include, which actually after I'm done making this article, I'm going to figure out how to do it, but they include four antennas, and these are actually Wi-Fi antennas. I believe they help the Wi-Fi be stronger so that the apps can work faster, just like a smart TV.
Another really great feature of this Smartboard is that it has 128 GB of storage, which is really huge in my opinion, because since I'm a teacher and I homeschool, I have a ton of different apps which I will also get into next. So here is the home screen. You can adjust it. You can change the background.
Let's first talk about the apps here. Some of these apps when I started the Smartboard were already on here, like the Whiteboard, the timer, Gmail, and Chrome, but then there are some other apps that I actually downloaded. It was super simple to download them. One of my favorite is Reading Eggs. That's one of the homeschool apps that I use. They're not sponsored or anything, um, just a really great app to help students with reading and math. I'll insert a little article here of my morning routine with my own kids because we do Reading Eggs every single morning. So this right here is called Reading Eggs, and a lot of homeschool moms have this app. It is something that we pay for, but we do this every single morning. I do it with my 4-year-old, and my six-year-old used to do it also, um, there's also something called Math Seeds that is really awesome to do on the Smartboard also. So they used to do this on the iPad before we had a Smartboard, but this is way more engaging, and my little baby here, he also likes to follow along, too. Um, um, so we'll show you a little preview of our morning routine of Reading Eggs.
"I am Sam. I am an an. Okay, look here, I can say the word I. I click on the word I. I click on the word I. I keep going, doing great. Click on I. He's watching himself on the camera."
Good job. So that's, this is called Reading Eggs. It's just one of my favorite home school programs. I I I I again it's super interactive on the Smartboard. The next thing that I really love about the home screen is that it clearly has the time and the date, because we also do a little bit of a calendar time with my kiddos, too, every morning, and so we talk about the date and what day of the week it is and so on.
So I'm going to actually turn down the brightness to see if you can see the screen just a little bit better. So it's really easy to adjust the brightness here, brighter and darker. On the home screen, you can actually only have six apps, which is okay because you can click this app, which it says more apps, and then here's all the different apps that I have downloaded, and some of these were on the Smartboard, too, when I just turned it on. So you can download a ton of different apps. I'll go through and I'll let you know which what which apps were already here on the Smartboard when it was still in the box. So we have the Play Store. The Play Store is actually where you will go to download more apps. It's kind of like the app store if you have an iPhone. Then we have YouTube, Gmail, Chrome.
Then here we have a little welcome presentation, and it's really cool. It's basically like PowerPoint. You can make your own presentation. So this is obviously great for teachers because because we are constantly doing different presentations, so this makes it super duper easy. Highly recommend this app, basically like PowerPoint.
So then also some other apps that were already on the Smartboard is your timer. You have your settings, your Vot Kit, which is a really cool app, too. This is definitely a fun one for teachers. I'm going to bring you a little closer so you can see just a little bit better, but anyways, right here it says please enter the voting subject, so teachers could use this in a million different ways. What is your favorite kind of animal or anything like that, and then you put in your different options and then students can easily go and vote for what their favorite is and it tallies it. It's a really cool little app that i' never even thought of that I'm definitely going to use. Next we have the file manager, screen recording, and the Whiteboard, which I will go more in depth about a little bit later, too.
Here are some apps that I downloaded from the App Store, so we have Paramount plus, a word search app, Suduko, Reading Eggs, Canva, love Canva, Netflix, so you can watch Netflix on here. This is a Smartboard, but it you could also use it as a TV cuz why not. We have YouTube TV, PBS Kids, my my kids love PBS Kids. Um, I downloaded Google Slides, Google Docs, my TPT app, the mirroring app which I haven't done anything with yet, I'll have to explore that. Um, we have WPS which I believe is like where you can open PDFs and things like that. Um, we have a calendar, the calculator, the you can have a gallery of photos, a hardware app, and then we have a camera also.
Okay, next I want to go through here and show you some apps that might be helpful for you as a teacher. The first one here that is already downloaded onto the Smartboard is the Whiteboard app. This app has been a lot of fun for my own kids to use. One of my favorite Parts about this specific app on the Smartboard is that there's basically endless ideas of things that you can do just with this one single app, and honestly this is probably my favorite app of the whole Smartboard, so let's get into it.
The first thing that you can do here is you can change the background. I'll show you how to do it. So the first thing you do, click these three dots down here and then you will go to settings, background settings and then you can change the color of the background. Lots of different options here, change it to whatever you'd like if you like a dark background around um you also can pick a different pick a color that you like your girl loves pink but we're going to keep it dark we'll change it to Black so that you can see a little bit better hopefully the sun isn't too bad here.
Okay, so you can change the background to completely blank. You can add in some squares, and I should add that we actually use this background a lot because when we are doing math, I like to have my students come up here um and they actually add the numbers within the squares and it helps them keep keep things aligned when we're learning like addition subtraction multiplication and division so there's a lot that you can do here with the squares. We also have the lines, which this is awesome. It reminds me of a piece of paper, so when I'm practicing writing with my students, I'll have them come up and practice staying within the lines. It helps them organize their thoughts and helps them practice writing just in general. Also when we're doing like word work, we will also use this kind of screen with the lines so that my students can keep the words within the lines. We have some dots. My own kids at home, they like to connect all the dots and draw different things on here. These squares kind of remind me of like latus multiplication. Then we have some smaller squares. We have different kind of lines and some bigger squares. So like I said, there is literally so much included in this Smartboard, especially the Whiteboard piece which I love. Basically anything you want to teach, like this is your app.
Here's another really cool piece. You can click this this plus button and you can, I don't have any files downloaded, but you can actually change the background to whatever you want. So if you want to add a funny picture of a student or a class picture or just like a coloring sheet anything like that, you can add that to this app. I'm going to make this just plain black so you can see hopefully a little bit better. Um, let's write something here, hi, and we got to include a smiley face cuz why not.
Okay, so here is our Masterpiece. What I'm going to do if I want to make like multiple slides, say that you want to keep whatever you're working on here, but you want to do another whiteboard, you just click this plus button and it adds a whole blank slide, but if you want to go back, we have so let's add something here, we'll add a nice big heart, and then if we want to go back to our other Masterpiece, here it is. You can flip back and forth. This is really great for multiple students. You can have them write their idea and then add a new slide to have the other kid write their idea. There's a lot you can do with that.
Okay, so we will click the dots down here. If you want to start completely over, you can click new, and then it asks you do you want to save this. So that's kind of cool that you can save your students work um or you can just delete it if you want, so we will click yes that we want to save it cuz why wouldn't we want to save this so we'll click yes and then it gives you an option which I love this because it has PDF options it also has an image option or you can just do source file which I believe is just so that you can reopen it on this Smartboard um so we'll just save it as that so now it is saved and we can go back to it if we want to and here is our new blank whiteboard now I'm going to go through some of these features here before we go back to all of the settings we'll do all the settings next so here is our pen you can change the color of your pen whatever color you want the rainbow is kind of fun so we'll write this in Rainbow HKMLC that is the name of this Smartboard here we'll click down here again again you can change the thickness to make it thicker or thinner I like the thicker drawing just for the purpose of this article so you can see better but a person who's just sitting right here in front of me they could easily see the thinnest line. Okay, so anyways you can change the colors to whatever you want and down here it shows you a preview of what your Line's going to look like. Let's change ours to Red for fun. Um, you can change your pen, you can change it to more pointy which is what we've been using. You can change it to like a marker kind of style, this is kind of fun.
Okay, let's see what else we got we have another type here so there's that line okay then this last one is really really sweet too so this last one right down here it actually makes it so like say that you're not very good at writing or you're not very good at drawing different shapes I'll draw a square for you see my square is not that great it's going to change it to me and make it a real Square how cool is that seriously next we'll do a circle look at that it's so cool I've never seen a Smartboard be able to do that so that's a really cool feature too.
Then we have the erase tool so if you want to erase things you just draw drag right over it it's really easy to erase everything if you want them to just erase everything you click the erase tool and then you drag this over and it clears it all so that's really quick too I like that little feature. Okay, so next we're going to move on to the shapes feature it's pretty awesome so you just click shapes down here and then you have a ton of different options for different shapes we'll just start with a circle so you basically just click and drag to make it bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller it's really fun my students love to use this and my own kids at home love to use it we'll do a star same thing you just click and drag it's really fun and and yeah look at that there's no way that you wouldn't have fun using the Smartboard.
Okay, so then we have a line, we have a dashed line. We'll show you the dashed one. You just draw a line like that. Here's this the solid line. Then we have some arrows. You can do a solid Arrow. There's also a dotted Arrow. Here's a triangle for geometry. Oh, you can do it different ways, which is kind of fun. There's our triangle and my kids also they love to add the shapes and then they like to color them Ino. Then we have trapezoids. We have rectangles. We have a half moon. We have a octagon. We even have 3D shapes, which is pretty sweet. Here's a triangular prism. We also have a cylinder. There's a lot of different 3D shapes. This just shows you the versatility of the Smartboard, and I think that they thought of literally everything when they created this Smartboard, because I have used multiple other smartboards and none of them included anything like this. I I really truly like love this Smartboard, I just thought I'd let you know that. We also have some different measuring tools on here.
Let's click this one. This is a timer on the Smartboard so say that you have 5 minutes to draw something or 5 minutes to do the math problem you can start your timer here and you can easily change the time and when the timer goes off it will make a little noise to alert your student or alert you that they are done so like I said kind of before you can add your own photo in here I don't have any photos uploaded but you can easily add a photo um then we also have insert table so this is really cool too because you can insert a table however big you want if you're teaching anything with tables click okay and it inserts your table so let's delete all of this so that you can see a little bit better.
All right guys, I'm going to cut the article right here because I just don't want it to be too long. There will be a part two and a part three that you can go watch. In these two parts, I'm going to continue exploring the Smartboard, and I'm also going to show you some really fun apps that you can use with your students in your classroom and I'm going to show you a ton of different ideas on how to use this Smartboard in your classroom to make learning way more inclusive and a lot more fun and interactive for your students. I really hope you enjoyed this article make sure to go watch part two and part three and you can find the link to this Smartboard in the description of this article. Again, this is called the HKMLC Smartboard 55 inch interactive whiteboard, so go check this out and I will see you for part two. Happy teaching guys!
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