Profile: Patrick McDaniel

Patrick McDaniel is, by his own admission, a traditional learner. “Books and reading are primarily what I benefit most from,” he said. Yet McDaniel also is adroit with technology. A senior Psychology major and student employee at the McKenzie Collaboration Center, he said that learning how to use the SMART Board was not a stretch.

“I have a touch screen PC [at home], so there’s not a whole lot of difference, but [the SMART Board] provides a certain interactivity that you can’t get using a computer mouse or track pad,” he said. “For drawing and writing it makes it a little more visual, a little less foreign.”

For the symposium, McDaniel took his own psychology class research and adapted it to PowerPoint to demonstrate the basic functions of the SMART Board. During his presentation he showed how to annotate PowerPoint slides to explain and emphasize concepts.

As a Collaboration Center employee, he teaches students and faculty how to use the SMART Boards, and he says new users often get excited by the possibilities.“We get that with a lot of people,” McDaniel said. “Not so much an A-HA! as in how they can use it, but an A-HA! as in, ‘That’s really cool!’ All the students and teachers, the minute they see it in use, they all light up.”

“Unfortunately, people come in not knowing how to use the SMART Board to their advantage,” he added.