Powerful interactive whiteboards

Hi everybody! We are Amaranta and Marta and today we start this adventure in the Cister Pearls Blog! Have you ever heard about the power of Interactive Whiteboards? In this post we will share with you the things that we have learnt about this amazing tool and its effective features during the last ICT session. 

It's widely known that old blackboards are exponentially getting obsolete so new motivating ways of teaching are showing up. Over the last few years, schools are realizing about the added value contributed by Interactive Whiteboards to learn, teach and collaborate at classroom. However, it's true that some teachers still find difficulties when it comes to use it for some reasons such as the lack of confidence and training, the belief that it's time consuming or because it implies getting away from their comfort zone. 

That's why keeping up-to-date and continuous training it's essential for educators to be competent at the current technological needs. This resource offers several advantages over traditional blackboards such as the ability to attend all different learning styles (visual, auditive, kinesthetic...) or the chance to design activities taking into account Bloom's Taxonomy (HOTS and LOTS).

Before presenting our activity, we think it's interesting to explain briefly some actions that Interactive Whiteboards can offer you. Some examples would be: adding, copying, pasting, editing text, images, gifs, graphics, shapes, videos; using templates about different kind of activities classified in different topics, creating new ones, searching on the Internet. In short, different kind of dynamic activities that involve children, promote participation and cooperative work. 

Activity: Let's know our body! 

Having said all that, we are going to present our activity about the parts of the body, aimed to review the content vocabulary: eyes, ears, mouth, nose, head, hair, arms, legs, shoulders, knees, toes, lips, fingers... This task is divided into two parts: the first one consists on identifying the parts of the body, matching the written words with the image (whole body of someone). The second part is more difficult because students are only provided with the image of the body and they will have to write it down the words. 

Description and organization of the activity

The class will be divided into three groups of four students small group). 

First part 

Students will see on the screen the body of a girl and some words written next to her. Each group will be in charge of matching six words. They will take turns to associate text-image. Teacher will ask them to participate in a sensible order to avoid classroom management issues. If any student doesn't know the answer, his/her group will help him/her. This will take about 15 minutes.

Second part

The groups will be the same. The picture of the body will be a boy. Students will have to write it down using the interactive markers the word that matches with the image. Each group will write four words. Because of this activity requires a higher level, students will have to cooperate and reach an agreement before the final answer (they need to be aware of the spelling). If the answer is right, they will get one point for their team. The team who get more points, will be the winner! This will take about 20 minutes. 

There are no specific roles because all the members are responsible for the same task. Everybody will participate (rotating each turn).


Picture of the activity:

Added value contributed by ICT

• Visual support
• Cooperative task
• Provides feedback: Well done, try again!
• Motivating