How to Adjust to your Interactive Whiteboard: The Chart Page
Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) have the potential to draw your students into lessons in ways that weren’t possible without substantial planning, troubleshooting, and cut-and-paste work on your part. In this second of what will become more posts, I’ll teach you how to quickly make a “chart” page that you can use over and over again. Then I’ll provide suggestions on how this chart page can be incorporated into various content areas at the middle and secondary level.
Why a “Chart” Page?
A “chart” page is easy to make and easy for you and your students to manipulate. You will use this page over and over again. Once you’ve saved this page, you and your students can quickly and easily create flow charts, concept maps, and other graphical representations of key ideas and concepts. As your students go to the IWB to demonstrate their thinking, you will find them more engaged and better able to retain information.
Jim Daly on 11 Sep 09But how can we identify a potentially good teacher? How can average teachers become better teachers? The secretary's special funding could make a crucial difference by financing a national program exploiting the electronic miracles of the Internet and video. We could escape geography by using the technology to have the best teachers appear in hundreds of thousands of disparate classrooms. This is a force multiplier. The classrooms would be equipped with a large, flat-screen monitor with whiteboards on either side; the monitor would be connected to a school server that contains virtually all of the lessons for every subject taught in the school, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The contents would use animation, video, dramatization, and presentation options to deliver complete lessons, to convey ideas in unique ways that are now unavailable in conventional classrooms. The classroom teachers would play the role of enhancers, answering questions and helping students better understand the material covered electronically; they'd pause the presentation to ask questions and to prompt critical thinking. The whiteboard would be the platform for student involvement.
