Making the Most of Your Time With an Interactive Board
Aug 2nd, 2008 by Scott Walker
It isn’t uncommon for a school to have an interactive board on hold for teachers to check out. I applaud any school that is putting technology like this in the hands of teachers in any way they can. Typically though, teachers seldom venture to check it out. Why? Is it too cumbersome to lug down to your room and set up? Lack of time with the software? Or maybe it’s a lack of knowing what exactly can be done with one in a short span of time.
How do you spend your short time with a board in these situations? What tips do you have to offer for those that will help a teacher quickly put one to use in their room before it has to be given back. Hit up the comments and send us your best tips. Maybe you prefer using videos like those provided by Discovery Streaming and BrainPOP, and you simply pause them at key points to write up questions and have the students come up and write their answers. Or maybe you use them to showcase fun interactive games. Regardless, give us your best in the comments!
As a district Ed Tech Specialist, I’m always pushing interactive whiteboards! On my site, under the Subject Area Links, I’ve listed many sites that work well with SMART Board. (These are designated by a small blue “SMARTBoard Friendly” symbol.) In addition, I encourage teachers to project their own documents and have students use the pens to do editing. Once the editing is done, it can be erased, and then students can do the editing on their own papers, to check what they have learned. This also works well when identifying parts of speech.
Wow Cindy! Great stuff there on your site! I’ll be sure to reference your site when I do my follow up to this article! Thanks for the contribution.
I was one of those teachers who took the white board from the media center and started using it last December. By the end of the year I had teachers coming by the room to watch me use it (and play with it) and my students got used to the interuptions. I love creating work in my first period and keeping the pages stored to recreate for subsequent classes. I love being able to immediately go to google to check out some fact. For example a math problem had a picture of a “1959 Les Paul Guitar.” One of my students said it wasn’t a Les Paul. We went to the website and looked at pictures and he was right! But, while we were doing that we could talk about features of the guitar and how they could effect sound or even the price. They still talk about it.