The advantages an interactive whiteboard can bring to the classrooms

Tweet

Schools and educators today are faced with an enormous challenge – how to connect with students who don’t know life without video games, the Internet and iPads. Many years ago, the premise of going up to the front of the classroom to write on the blackboard was enough to get students to pay attention. This generation of students expects more. They watch their favorite television shows in high-definition and get answers to their questions in a split second on an Internet search engine. Schools and educators around the world have started to harness high-tech teaching tools to bridge the digital divide and make sure students are engaged and excited about what they are learning in the classroom. One of the most popular high-tech teaching tools available to schools is the interactive display. Interactive whiteboards take a high-tech product students are already familiar with – a computer – and combine it with teachers’ lessons to make learning interactive. An interactive whiteboard can be an electromagnetic or touch-sensitive board that allows teachers to conduct interactive lessons from any resource on their computer. Using an interactive pen or their finger, teachers can control how the lesson is displayed on the screen and add notes, images, and even audio/video files to make it more engaging for today’s students. Many schools have installed interactive white boards in classrooms to help teachers better facilitate their lessons and engage the entire classroom. Since this is still a fairly new technology, some schools are unfamiliar with all of the advantages an interactive whiteboard can bring to their classrooms. Understanding how to leverage this powerful teaching tool can provide schools with one of the most effective ways to connect with and educate today’s students. With interactive whiteboards, teachers no longer need to spend time during class drawing complicated graphics or diagrams that take away from the time he or she could devote to more beneficial tasks, like one-on-one personal instruction and interaction with the students. Optical interactive whiteboard paired with manufacturer-specific software give educators access to a number of tools to enhance their lessons. These software programs often contain annotation tools, image galleries, and background templates, like maps and grids. One such feature in these software programs gives teachers and students the ability to instantaneously add their own notes to the lessons for the entire classroom to view. The lessons with the notes can be saved and printed out for students to take home and review, emailed to students, and posted to the teacher’s Website.