After years of interactive whiteboards being touted as the next best thing for engaging students, the unfortunate reality is that while they have become common in many schools, they are often used as glorified projector screens. Interaction may take place with the board, but more often than not it’s being directed by the teacher and students merely consume the interaction in a passive way.It doesn’t have to be this way!I use interactive whiteboards (IWB) in my classrooms regularly and conduct best-practice training sessions for my district’s staff. Based on my experiences, I’ve put together a few tips, techniques and tricks you can use to start making more effective use of your interactive whiteboard and get your students actively using it as a part of their daily educational experience
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BEGINNER ACTIVITIES
Group note taking
Use the board as you would your plain old regular whiteboard, but with one difference. SAVE the notes! Most IWB vendors include software that serves as a blank canvas for creating presentations and taking notes. Encourage your students to come up and jot down a few discoveries they make during independent work time or notes that might help the rest of the class on a particular topic or project. Save the notes at the end of the class—you now have a digital record of the day’s learning! Print out the notes or publish them as a PDF to your website for later student consumption.
Online interactives
It’s tough to find time to learn all the bells and whistles of your IWB’s software, so tap into the thousands of online flash-based activities and interactives that are already available. Below are a few of my favorites:
A great place for emergent readers to explore letters and words and play with them. Interactive multimedia books, complete with narration, make this website a great fit for IWBs.
A wide range of virtual manipulatives that work with almost all IWBs. Interactive digital tools for exploring data, algebra, geometry and more can be found here ready to be “played” with on your IWB.
a useful UK-based website that includes an index of dozens of websites, online activities and web-based resources that play nicely with many IWBs.
INTERMEDIATE ACTIVITIES
Check your vendor’s lesson sharing community
Most of the IWB vendors now have interactive resource and lesson sharing communities to help teachers find new ways to use their boards. Many of these lessons are already tied to teaching standards and often include many engaging activities, interactive assessments and tutorials for building your own interactive lessons. The sites listed below not only have great resources for your particular software and vendor, but they also have forums, blogs and other community features that allow you to connect with other educators using the same products as you.
Give students control via center time
Once you feel comfortable navigating the tools and the new learning opportunities your IWB has to offer, turn it over to your students. Pull up one of the lessons you’ve downloaded from your vendor’s lesson plan sharing community and let your students work in small groups with the IWB. Your IWB can be a math, science or language arts center instantly by adding it to the rotation of learning centers in your classroom. If you use an interactive lesson that you’ve already used in class, it can serve as a practice or reinforcement tool. Often students love to repeat interactive lessons when they’re the ones doing the “driving.”
ADVANCED ACTIVITIES
Student created interactives
It’s my experience that almost everyone loves games. Mix some gaming elements with study materials and you can begin to encourage students to create their own interactive learning resources. I’ve seen students create fully functioning interactive mazes, matching games and other games using our IWBs at school. By manipulating the learning material and exploring how to integrate it within a game or simulation, the students are exposed to the content in new ways over an extended period of time. Allow students to use your tools to see what they can create, but give them some guidelines. For example:
Capture lessons using screen recording tools
Being able to make a lesson more interactive through your IWB’s tools is a huge boon to engagement in your classroom, but being able to capture the learning experience to share with students is even better. Many of the IWB software tools include a screen recording tool, complete with audio capture via the computer’s microphone, but there are also tons of free screen recording tools available on the web. Snagit, Screencast-o-Matic or Quicktime X included with new Macs are all ways to capture what’s happening on your computer screen. Have students capture what they’re doing on their computers, or capture something on your own machine, and then embed the video into your flipchart, notebook or other IWB presentation software. Now you’ve got powerful firsthand full video learning experiences embedded directly into your lesson!
DON’T JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT
NEA member Josh Smeader, 6th grade social studies and science teacher in Mattawan, Michigan is new to interactive whiteboards, but has already discovered the key to making them work with his students:
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“We put our notes, games, reading and pretty much anything possible on the board so we can write on it and manipulate it to fit what we are doing. Also, the students are much more willing to get involved in what we are doing. Many of the students who would normally just sit and listen will be willing to get involved to be able to come up and use the board. If you just turn the board on it doesn't do anything to involve them.”
Just having the students come up and take control is a big achievement—a great first step that can lead to more advanced uses of interactive whiteboards.
Ben Rimes is an NEA member, K-12 Technology Coordinator for the Mattawan Consolidated School District in Mattawan, MI and a technology advocate blogger for The Tech Savvy Educator.
Like a snowball gaining in size and momentum, bright, white, digital SMART Boards are on a roll taking over K-12 classrooms. These powerful visual tools have revolutionized the way teachers run their classrooms, including how they handle simple record-keeping tasks, engage student interest, demonstrate complex information, assess learning and prepare students for an increasingly digital world.
Knowing what’s new and what’s helpful for classroom instruction is something we must keep in mind whenever we create curricula or are just simply chatting with students. That’s why if you’re able to snag a SMART Board for your classroom (which is awesome!), we want to help you make the most of it. You could use it to:
SMART Boards in the classroom at the elementary level are incredibly helpful for start-of-day routines such as taking attendance and lunch count.
For example, before class every day, a first grade teacher could post large, colorful icons marked with individual student names. The board could also show pictures of the day’s lunch choices. Then, instead of waiting for roll call and lunch count or checking in on a magnet board or pocket chart, the students could use their fingers to guide their icons to their lunch choices. Once the record-keeping is complete, the teacher could report attendance and lunch counts.
This process also helps young students become comfortable with the touch process that is becoming so important in using Wi-Fi digital tools, such as computer notepads and e-readers that some schools are adopting for instructional use.
As you well know, teachers often jokingly say that it takes a few years to develop “eyes” on the back of their heads so they can detect misbehavior when facing away from students. SMART Boards change classroom management by minimizing the amount of time teachers need to turn their back to the class to write on dry-erase whiteboards or chalkboards.
By connecting a computer to a SMART Board, you can stand face forward and attract student attention to a particular topic by sharing PowerPoint presentations, software lessons, or interactive websites with the entire class in one sitting—and you could do this before students begin small group or independent work on the same topic.
During SMART Board lessons, you could help students gain digital and presentation skills by give them turns manipulating the equipment. Think of this practice as the digital age equivalent of going up to the blackboard to solve a problem.
Academically speaking, at the same time, SMART Boards can enhance your teaching of various lessons. Examples include:
Young children have short attention spans and respond better to instruction if it includes movement and hands-on action, such as getting up to answer a question or demonstrating how to use a tool.
Not surprisingly, the Australian journal Teaching Science notes that kindergarten students enjoy touching SMART Boards to answer questions and participate in lessons. They also respond well to the colorful graphics that are much easier for a large group to view on a large screen.
Using electronic pens to circle items or moving virtual objects with their fingers, kindergarten students can sort items on a SMART Board to show what they know about a particular subject. For example, you could ask them to separate objects that require electricity from those that don’t.
If you teach upper elementary or higher grade levels, consider asking your students to demonstrate their knowledge by taking multiple choice tests with the help of SMART Boards. They could also participate in interactive test review sessions before the final test near the conclusion of a learning unit.
If your school has the right software and equipment, students could even respond to questions on the screen by using individual, handheld remote clickers that record their answers for later review and grading by the teacher.
A good reminder: the objective of using a SMART Board isn’t to take traditional book learning, hands-on experiences, or paper testing away from students. Instead, they’re designed to reinvigorate and engage students up by adding variety to instruction, getting them moving, and providing cool ways to respond to questions.
Especially in one-computer classrooms, SMART Boards are smart choices because they quickly provide a big picture of learning. Connected to computers, they offer whole-group access to colorful, educational websites, powerful assessment software, and teacher-made materials tailored to a class’s needs. Enjoy yours!
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