IWB experience

I’ve never used an IWB before until last week in our ICT session. I don’t have an IWB at home and I haven’t started working as a teacher yet so I didn’t had the opportunity to work with this technology.

After the first contact with an IWB I can say that I really liked the experience because it was not difficult to use it and because I think that it is a very useful tool that offers some advantages when teaching and affects learning in several ways.

First of all, digital boards can promote and increase students’ motivation and enthusiasm for learning and, consequently, raise the level of students’ engagement in classroom and prevent passive learning. Sessions become dynamic and participative and children have an active role, so I imagine that they enjoy it.  

Secondly, IWBs provides visual support that complements teachers’ explanations and help children to understand better the content of the lesson.

IWBs also provide a wide variety of dynamic activities to be done in the classroom. As teachers, we can create many types of activities for our kids and children can draw; write, put images, copy and paste things as many times they want, be creative, add audio files and audio recordings do the exercises the teacher prepares and create their own ones.

Finally, apart from teaching specific content related to a subject or topic, we also educate children to become ICT knowledgeable students.

In the last session I was being working on two different Smart Board activities related to Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The first activity is based on remembering so it is for working on Lower Order Thinking Skills. It is an activity for first grade of primary. It consists on matching the words with the correct images so, after having previously introduced clothes vocabulary, children have to relate words and pictures to practice and remember the vocabulary presented.

The second one focusses on creation so promotes higher order thinking skills. This activity is for second or third grade of primary (depending on their level of English) and the topic is “wild animals”. We’ll do it after dealing with wild animals. It is called I spy with my little eye something… and under the title they have a square and a speaking bubble. Inside the square they have to “draw” a wild animal, the one they want (they have to look for an image of this animal and past it inside the square). Then, they have to write a short description of this animal inside the speaking bubble (see in the example) and finally, they also have read out loud and record the description and add it inside the bubble. Once they have created the activity, they will group in peers or in threes and they will play the game. So one child will start reading and listening the description of his classmate and he will try to guess which animal it is. When he thinks that he knows the animal, he will click inside the square and the image will appear so he will be able to check if he was right or not. If he doesn’t know the animal, he can ask his classmate for some more clues. Then, the other child will do the same. The image is an example of the final product. Children have to design all the activity (write the title, draw the square and the speaking bubble, search the image of the animal, past it inside the square and add animation, write the description inside the bubble and record the description.)

here is the link to get to the file