Interactive Whiteboards and Clickers in the Classroom

September 5th, 2008 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Teachers' Corner

Seventh grade language arts teacher Beth Hill stands in front of the photocopier less and less each year. Hill has an interactive whiteboard in her classroom, so the need for handouts has decreased.

“I have one large packet of worksheets that I use to review reading maps, charts, graphs, floor plans, etc. I used to just give [students] the worksheets and let them do the [sheets] individually,” Hill said. “Once I got the board, I scanned all the worksheets into Notebook software and let the kids come to the board to complete the activities. They’re much more involved.”

Interactive whiteboards are the latest technology advancement for the classroom. The whiteboard is like a touch-screen extension of the teacher’s computer. Touching the whiteboard allows users to interact with it in the same manner as pointing and clicking a computer mouse. Students are able to write on the board with special inkless pens and teachers are able to save the class’s work to view or print later.

Hill, a 16-year teaching veteran, has had an interactive whiteboard in her classroom for 3 ½ years. She teaches at Estill County Middle School, which has a partnership with Berea College. The college arranges field trips for the school’s students and provides computer labs, workshops, and interactive whiteboards for the school’s teachers.

Clicking for student engagement and monitoring. The whiteboard in Hill’s classroom has a student response system, or as Hill calls it, a set of clickers. Each student in Hill’s room has an assigned clicker. To check understanding during a lesson, Hill projects a question with multiple choice answers on the screen. Students respond to the question using their clickers. She can instantly see who in the class has understood the lesson, who has not, and who isn’t paying attention.

“I use Brain Pop to create ten-question quizzes. The kids buzz in their answers and at the end of each question it shows a graph. It gives me instant feedback about what the kids are learning at the time,” Hill said. “If 80% miss a question, I can stop right then and re-teach.”

When the bell rings, Hill can use the impromptu quizzes as participation or daily grades as well. “I can pull up a report with each child’s name and score and import it into an Excel spreadsheet,” she said.

A bridge to special ed. Working with special education teachers is easier, too. Hill can e-mail notes and materials from class to them for resource use.

“Last year I had two students in special ed. The special ed. teacher told me they said the clickers increased their activity in class,” Hill said. “They had to be engaged in class because the number of the clicker appears on [a portable] screen for me.”

Interactive whiteboards are a great tool, but they’re not cheap. To use one, a teacher’s classroom needs to have a computer and an LCD projector. Depending on its size, the interactive whiteboard alone can cost from $1,500 to $2, 370, according to a report in T + D (Feb 2008).

Training. Studies say that teacher professional development is essential to properly using the interactive whiteboard. Hill’s training taught her the basics: set-up, navigating on the interactive whiteboard, browsing online, manipulating images, and incorporating board work with other applications like PowerPoint. However, hands-on use is what Hill recommends for learning how to use the new technology.

“The best thing is to just play around with it,” Hill said. “You can’t break it or tear it up.”