How to use the Interactive Whiteboard

 

Our ICT Session this week was on using the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB). IWBs are used in schools all over the country. The Becta Harnessing Technology Schools Survey 2007 indicated that 98% of secondary and 100% of primary schools had IWBs. Therefore it is very important for student teachers to learn how to use the IWB!

Some benefits of using the IWB are:

• It is useful for developing discussion skills
• It is engaging 
• It's a great resource for visual learners, kinaesthetic learners and audio learners
• It saves on paper resources
• It can be very accessible for EAL and SEND children
• Edutainment!

Some issues to consider when using the whiteboard are:

• Have a back-up plan in case there is a technical failure
• Know the technology that you're using
• Check the content of the whiteboard resource first
• Accessibility of the resource to your class
• Positioning of the board
• Text visibility.

Further information and resources on the IWB can be found here. 

We were able to download a useful interactive whiteboard program called SMART notebook which has lots of creative features to make resources with. We learnt about many useful activities on SMART notebook, such as how to use the checker tool and magnifying glass, and taught some to each other in our class. We looked at the balloon pop feature. Here's a video with some tips on how to edit the balloon to suit whichever resource you want to make:

Below is a picture of the balloon popping resource our group made. The rest of the class had to guess the animal beginning with 'b' from the clues on the balloons. They came up to the board and popped the balloon to see if their guess was correct. The balloon over the badger has already been popped!

Useful Links:
http://www.dit.ie/lttc/media/ditlttc/documents/gettingthemost.pdf
http://downloads01.smarttech.com/media/research/whitepapers/int_whiteboard_research_whitepaper_update.pdf
http://www.ncef.org/rl/interactive_whiteboards.cfm