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Using Interactive Whiteboards
With the increasing emphasis on whole class teaching and raising standards many teachers have been lucky enough to have an interactive whiteboard (IWB) installed into their classroom to use as a teaching tool. So what benefits does the interactive board offer to the teacher? The benefits are too numerous to mention individually but this article should be able to give you a taster!
IWBs improve the quality of interactions and improve teacher assessment
Without a doubt the whiteboard improves the quality of interactions through the use of the increasing number of resources available for the teacher to use as a tool.
In Literacy the IWB enables teachers to deconstruct, reconstruct or reorder text as part of the shared reading or writing sessions to allow children to identify the key features of a particular text type or to reorder sentences to decide which sounds the most effective. Similarly the IWB allows the class to investigate plurals and to devise a rule by sorting the words into groups quickly. It also enables teachers to model the writing process enabling children to see how text can be edited to make improvements.
In Mathematics, the DfES are developing Interactive Teaching Programs (ITPs) to support the teaching of unit plans and teachers can use these on a whiteboard or with a projector. These currently include telling the time, measuring scales, measuring cylinder, number line, number grid, thermometer, fractions, data handling, coordinates and area all of which are available on the standards website http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/numeracy . The screens enable teachers to ask a range of questions, both prompting and probing, to assess the children’s understanding as well as teaching new concepts. In the coordinates example to the right, the teacher might ask the children to identify a third coordinate that could make a right-angled triangle. There is of course more than one answer to this and adding a new cross and dragging it to the suggested location can easily demonstrate any suggestions made by the children.
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The use of this technique allows the teacher to extend the pupils’ thoughts by asking them to imagine the diagonal line [drawn on the board with the pen] is a mirror. What would the new coordinates be if they were reflected in the mirror line? The children can be given time out to consider the answer in pairs, record the coordinates on their individual whiteboards and then the teacher can create three new points to place on the board to check if their hypothesis is correct. This type of activity can be used to assess children’s learning and aid the teacher’s planning for future lessons. |
Increase the pace of learning
| Although this is not to be mistaken for increasing the pace of teaching! IWBs enable teachers to test hypotheses suggested by the children for example to test if 157 is divisible by 3 having displayed the multiples of 3 on the IWB the children [with good questioning from the teacher!] have devised a rule that when you find the digit sum of a multiple of 3 the total will be 3,6 or 9. So if we add the digits 1+5+7 = 13 so 1 + 3 = 4. Therefore suggesting that 157 is not divisible by 3. |  |
Of course the use of an IWB does not negate the fact that children should also be interactive with the teacher giving answers before using the IWB to confirm or model the answer. So don’t throw the petal cards or small whiteboards out; continue to use them to ensure all children are fully engaged. The IWB enables the teacher to check the answers on the boards before modelling the answer on the interactive whiteboard.
So you have heard enough from me, what about those teachers who have a whiteboard in their class room?
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