Interactive White Board

I've recently beeing working through our in-college Interactive White Board training programme.

I've found this to be of great benefit to me.  Whilst I have had training on the IWB, and had practiced using a variety of the tools that the IWB had to offer, I had not made extensive use of it in the classroom.  In fact, I thought I was doing quite well because I often get the students to come up and write on the board themselves and I've saved the odd file to put on Moodle afterwards.

However, doing the training reminded me to play with some of the more advanced features - recording the screen for example, or using the magic pen, changing the background and saving a series of pages as a PowerPoint presentation.  Having to evidence use of these tools in a real lesson made me think about how they might be useful, and I have definitely found this to be beneficial.  For example, I recently got a student to demonstrate how to add an icon to the desktop, and I recorded their actions.  I then saved this file and uploaded it to YouTube so that I could embed it into their Moodle pages.  Now they can remind themselves how to add an icon to the desktop, even when I'm not there.

This ability to extend the classroom time is something I will endeavour to do much more in the future, as it also means that those who miss the lesson, or found it particularly difficult, can revisit what was covered in their own time, and as often as they need to.