Discovering IWB

Increasingly, Interactive whiteboards (IWB) are gaining ground in the classrooms. They are a powerful tool in the teaching learning process adding interactivity and collaboration. When used innovatively IWB create a wide range of learning opportunities raising the level of student engagement, motivating students and promoting enthusiasm for learning. Moreover, I believe that our nowadays students, as digital natives, feel confident using this tool, which is always a positive aspect.

As far as my experience using IWB, I've just used them in one school where I did some substitutions. And I couldn't really use them as I wanted because I had to follow some instructions as a substitute. But my mother is an Infant education teacher, and she has an IWB on her classroom. And I’ve seen her using it a lot! She works with the Panasonic elite Panaboard Software and it is really useful for her. She creates lots of activities to do which are so interesting for her 5 year-old-students. 

After our last session on ICT, I’ve been investigating and discovering how to use SMART Notebook, and eventually I’ve created two activities related with the topic of fairytales. They are thought to use in Year 4 Primary. 

The first one, according to Bloom’s digital Taxonomy it’s a “Remember-Understand” activity, so it is a LOT (Low Ordered Thinking). I’ve created it with the Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0 and it focuses on the fairytales characters. As you can see, the activity consist on clicking the right picture according to the word that appears in the red rectangle. The fact of scoring, having limited time and adding sound effects will engage children. 

The second activity, according to Bloom’s digital Taxonomy it’s a “Creating” activity, so it is a HOT (High Ordered Thinking). Using the vocabulary that students would have learnt doing the first activity, this time they would have to create a scene of a story. First, they would have to roll different dice, one for choosing the setting and two more for choosing the characters. Then, they would have to complete the sentences besides the dice.

Finally, students would have to create a scene in comic style using the vocabulary they have been working. This last part can be adapted to the level of every specific group and also to the level of each child, as everyone can complicate the dialogue as much as he wants to. 

You can download and try these activities by clicking here. 

To conclude, I want to say that using SMART Notebook software I’ve discovered lots of advantages and countless ideas have come to my mind. However, I’ve also fins some things that I don’t like so much. First, when you insert some images in your Notebook document, it slows down and it crashes sometimes (so be careful not to insert large images!). Second, I’ve found several limitations on the use of animations of objects. It happened to me that I had ideas in my mind that I would be able to do with Power Point and then I couldn’t do it with SMART Notebook.  

Despite this, using SMART Notebook Software on IWB has been an enriching experience and it has caused me want to continue learning and creating things.