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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.

But many advocates of this technology (myself included), see IWBs as genuine means of bringing more interactivity, more student-focus into classrooms of traditional teachers

What we don't want to forget is that someone who is coaching a teacher is not really looking for "good technology use" but for just good educational practices. Having an IWB is not going to change a lecturer into something else.

Any item in the Instruction domain can be enhanced using an IWB.

"There's still a place for the main focus of the class to be on a shared screen, whether that's an IWB [interactive whiteboard], an interactive monitor, or whatever," says Danny Nicholson, the author of The Whiteboard Blog, in an email.

If you’re like many teachers, you find IWBs (Interactive Whiteboards) both exciting and intimidating.

In this first of this two-part post, we’ll explore dos and dont’s with your new IWB. In my next post, I’ll give you some basic lesson plan tips I’ve found that have worked and provide links to some amazing IWB resources.

Understanding Layers As you grow accustomed to using your IWB (interactive whiteboard) on a regular basis, you’ll doubtless come up with ideas that you would like to implement. At the same time, you may not feel ready to experiment with actions, sounds, and other properties. Fortunately, you can do a lot with your IWB if you understand layers and use them wisely. Using layers on your IWB is easy and a great step forward in getting your kids to interact with your board.

How to Adjust to Your Interactive Whiteboard: Animate Objects and Add Sound There is nothing quite as fascinating to students as words and objects that appear and disappear on command. And if you’re looking for a giggle or a laugh, nothing does the trick like an unexpected sound effect when a student is at your board. Embedding sounds and setting up Object Animation is pretty straight-forward. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to add surprise elements quickly and create elaborate, interactive pages sure to capture your students’ attention.

A teacher can create engaging lessons that focus on one task such as a matching activity where students use either their fingers or a pen to match items. Another teacher might integrate multiple items into a lesson plan such as websites, photos, and music that students can interact with, respond to verbally or even write comments on the board itself.

Interactive whiteboards facilitate multisensory learning

If you’re new to Interactive Whiteboards, chances are you’ve had a couple of training sessions that focused on creating pages from scratch. While I am definitely a big advocate of being innovative, I also strongly believe that time is precious and teachers have too little of it.  In this post, I’ll give you some tips on how to seamlessly incorporate your pre-existing lesson activities for use on your new IWB.

When given the chance, students love getting involved in the classroom and voicing their opinions.  We know that students who are actively engaged learn and retain more.  Here are 4 fast and easy ways to get your students involved and engaged with your classic or interactive whiteboard (IWB).