EDUC4105

Reflection, week 11

Interactive whiteboards have many potential benefits for teaching. As far as visual learners go, they offer so much more than conventional whiteboards/blackboards, and so even simple features such as a highlighter seem to me to be a great advantage in keeping the learning visually engaging. The ability to both type and prepare board work mean that the teacher doesn’t need to have their back to the audience and can focus on helping students and give them a chance to walk around the room. One of its main advantages is that it is connected to the internet and can swiftly go form board to projector etc allowing easy transition between different media.

Integrating these benefits smoothly can be difficult, and I agree with the view that funding and developing new technologies is valuable but teachers also need training in how to use them effectively and creatively otherwise they could easily be very expensive and power dependant writing boards. Our inexperience with the boards has made some of our lessons very fiddly and impractical, but I don’t think it would be long until we were using them more effectively.