Transcript

The interactive whiteboard is an amazing tool for differentiating your instruction and meeting the needs of all the learners in the classroom. The board is used daily in the classroom, both by myself and by the students. So, from when I come in the morning to when I leave in the afternoon it's up and running. If I'm using it through instruction, students are using it through touch, visually, or by some of the peripheral devices, and once they're set out on their task, some of the students will use the board as their manipulative to solve problems in language, in math, in their research in social studies or science. 

Active Expression Response Device 
One of the devices that is exceptionally useful as an instructional strategy and for assessment is the respond system. Students can send in answers to questions, ask questions, can make comments, both anonymously or not, and it's all done from push of a button from their seat.

This slide we are viewing right now was an assessment done as to things that we can infer in language. Students were asked what they could infer about and send in their responses. 20 students sent in their responses, we highlighted all of our responses that were similar with certain colors and narrowed it down. Through a process of elimination, we eliminated responses and grouped responses to come together as five different things that we felt as a group were valuable that we can infer about. 

Active Slate Interactive Tablet
The slate is an interface to the board that we can pass around the classroom and have students interact with the board from their seats. In this example here, a student has highlighted some information that was pertinent to the discussion and they were able to interact with this device from their seat. 

One of the most important elements of the interactive whiteboard are the tools that are available within the software that allows us to set up students thinking and allow them to interact with the board. For example, in this slide here, we have two halves a passenger ticket from the Titanic covered; we can slowly erase the blue that is covering them (Opacity Adjustment Tool) and start to look at the tickets. The value in this is reducing distractibility and honing in on specific parts of the work that you are trying to look at. 

Pen Tool
One of the most used and effective use of the board is the Pen Tool. Pen Tool allows you to annotate on top of any work that's appearing on the board. It also allows you to annotate over websites, word documents, PDFs and things that are being viewed on the document camera. In this example we examined a poem with the class, we were able to highlight words, and phrases and connect them with our thoughts and inferences about the poem.

Snapshots: Screen Capture Tool  
One of the greatest functions of the Interactive white board is the ability to take snap shots of websites, documents that are on the document camera, PDF files or word files and transfer those snapshots into slides and be able to annotate on top of them, compare them with other snapshots that you have taken, print them, or simply examine them on the board.