Interactive Whiteboards

I am excited about the variety of educational applications that the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) affords teachers. They can use it to show pod casts and engage students in web based interactive lessons. It can be used to create lessons that students physically participate in by dragging informational pieces or write in answers to solve problems. Teachers can make notations on presentations, or highlight information in their lessons to help further explain a concept and then save them. The IWB can also be used to simply write notes or draw diagrams to illustrate a lesson. When they write on a page if the IWB has hand writing recognition, it can convert it to print. Teachers can do many things with their pages they can label them, duplicate (clone) them, quickly and easily reorganize them, and incorporate preexisting pages in a new group.

What is exciting is that the IWB really expands the classroom giving the teacher essentially unlimited board space. Studies have been done to research just how teachers are using the IWB. It seems that the phrase "using the interactive whiteboard," meant different things to different teachers. The study defined five basic contexts for using the IWB. The first three involve the teacher either as a demonstrator, a modeler, or in control inviting the students to participate in a class exercise. The last two basic contexts are pupils in control being guided by the teacher, and pupils working independently on a task. At the close of the study teachers not only felt that they now had a way of uniformly assessing how they are using the IWB, but it also help some to expand their methods from just whole class - teacher centered work to independent pupil centered work.

There are published concerns about the US being behind in acquiring IWB for the classroom. Well if we are behind one good point is that the technology in our classrooms has to be newer and each year technology improves. Other people are arguing that the hardware is more important than software and vice versa. How can one be more important than the other? If one were bad it most likely would cause the user not to succeed in their endeavor.