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.

Award Winning Teacher Blog.

Ms. Cassidy's Classroom is a blog intended for sharing content with parents of her first grade students and other educators. She shares posts about daily happenings in her room. She also collects anecdotes of each child's learning on this site. I believe that she has the children create their own blogs, and post certain things to this blog. These anecdotes include drawings, videos, images of the child participating in something. This provides parents with easy access to what their child is doing in the classroom. It also helps the teacher keep up with important anecdotes that may become lost in the classroom. While the posts that are currently featured are from the very first of the year, the work samples are small and the children are spending much time simply learning routines. I see this blog becoming more of a staple of their classroom learning as the children progress through the school year.

Here are some images shared as anecdotes:

 

Here are some  images shared as whole class blog posts: 

I feel that this very beneficial for certain classrooms and grade levels. It certainly works well for this teacher. While her organization is wonderful and her pictures are cute as a button, I would worry about confidentiality with this blog. I know nothing about these children, but their images are posted online for the whole world to see. I would probably use a password protected blog, if anything. I would also not require the students to make and keep up with their own blogs, but my four year olds are on a much different level than these first graders. I like the idea of keeping up with anecdotes digitally, but again would keep them on a password protected blog or mobile application such as Seesaw. My question would be about how to make these "edublogs" private. I know there is a setting on Blogger (or there use to be) to make people put in a password when loading the page, but not sure about "edublog".