Thursday, 14 May 2015

IWB, making the best of them!

Children are in contact with many technological devices nowadays; their parents’ mobile phone or their own (depending on the age), tablets, computers, laptops... Schools’ contexts are not different and our students are in contact as well with all these devices but also with something quite different which are Interactive whiteboards.

In my opinion they are very interesting and dynamic resources to take advantage of. They allow us to use a large amount of tools, programmes and resources or even create ours, which depending on the case might be more meaningful and adapted to our students. They are also attractive due to the fact that students can actively participate and interact when doing activities in the class with these devices. By contrast, digital whiteboards only allow teachers to project different materials but this is not as much motivating as having the chance to “play” with the interactive ones.

My experience with Interactive Whiteboards is quite limited. I’ve used them in different occasions but nobody has properly taught me how to make the most of them; therefore the use I could have done was not appropriate by a long shot.

Our last session helped me to learn more about Interactive Whiteboards as well as learn about Notebook and how to use it to design a varied sort of activities to develop English (or other content) in our class. I’ve created two activities in which we can develop both LOTS and HOTS of Bloom’s Taxonomy, specifically, understanding in the first one and creating in the second one.

The first activity consists of finding the hidden word. The students will need to choose a letter, click on it and see if the hidden word contains the letter they have chosen. They will be able as well to check the clue which will give them a description of the hidden word. This kind of game can be adapted to any topic we decide to work on; I focused it on describing adjectives and personal features including the names of all of us; the idea is to do it with the names of our students so that it becomes something interesting for them and customized. 



















The second activity allows us to work on creativity as well as on personal features and parts of the face. The students will create a new classmate by making a compilation using different parts of their faces. They can create different classmates so that everybody can participate using a part of his/her face: eyes, nose, mouth, hair.... Once they will have created the new classmate they will record themselves introducing this new character. It is important to mention here, that this activity can be adapted according to any topic, for instance animals. Another possible option is to create a new character/pet using different objects: food, toys, etc.


Hope you find them interesting!

Cheers   


No comments:

Post a Comment