All About Interactive White Boards

Interactive whiteboards are becoming a popular trend in education and early childhood education in particular. It engages the children in a way that may not happen on a traditional whiteboard or large group situation. Chapter 1 of Blanche O’Bannon’s Engaging Learners with Interactive Whiteboards provides a great introduction to the concept.

1.1 Introduction
This page states that there are many resources for teachers at Promethean Planet. This includes pre-made interactive features such as pull tabs and magic revealers. It is also stated that while many teachers have adopted use of these boards in their classroom ye there is little empirical evidence about their effect on children’s learning. There are even third parties who create content for the interactive whiteboards such as the Public Broadcasting Service.

1.2 Effective Use
This page explains many options for use of interactive white boards in classrooms. These include child response systems, videos/music options, shared reading, and drag and drop features. I see a lot of use of the interactive white boards in my practicum placement. Children will often be seen watching videos, playing drag and drop games, signing into class, and writing their letters.

1.3 Instructional Benefits
This section mentions some benefits including options for multimodal representation, ease of getting children’s attention, better classroom management, and active learning. I think that these are true in the case of early childhood education because there is a visual presentation of the concepts. For example, children can watch their noise level with a visual representation of
 the volume

1.5 Instructional Challenges
There are many challenges that are described in this section. Some of which include a lack of teacher knowledge and competency with the board. This means that the teachers are not using the board to the most of the board’s ability. I definitely see this becoming a problem in early childhood education as it is much easier for the children to learn to use the board as a substitute whiteboard than it is to learn to use it in other ways.