WEEK 5:"THE USE OF IWB"

Obviously all of us in class knew the Interactive White Boards, but we didn’t have any idea about what really are the advantages of their implementation, or what is else, that we can design IWB activities without an IWB.

The discovery of E-beam software broke my expectative of new technologies. With this software we can create activities about whatever we want to work with the children in class. Sometimes we don’t need pre-designed activities, sometimes we only need our imagination.

Here are some examples of the activities we designed:

Thanks to the READING 5 and the class in which we shared our own activities and we discussed about the use of IWB along our internship; we can affirm that Interactive White Boards are the currently the novelty and maybe in the future their use or implementation won’t be so motivating for children, but there are too many advantages we must take into account:

• Flexibility and versatility: Enhance handwriting (gross motor movements improve the fine ones) and helps students with lower abilities or special needs.
• Give “a different colour” to your class using videos, photos…
• Good to identify and correct student’s problems or misconceptions
• IWB games help students to develop decision making skills.
• Connexion between visual and aural information received.
• Efficiency: Avoid wasting time on management of resources; Quicken the pace of lesson;
  Instant access to pre-prepared lesson, saved works…
  
• Students pay more attention, there is only one distraction in class: THE IWB
• Improvements in attention and behavior of students.
• More enjoyable and interesting lessons for students.
• Good quality of presentations (visual images) to get students involved in literacy.
• Students are full of anticipation.
• Makes learning more memorable: enhance the learning process (stimulating colours and visual images).

To sum up, this week made me reflect on how essential is to have a good criteria to evaluate if a resource is good enough or not to be implemented, avoiding to be influenced by novelties or fashion (that besides are usually very expensive). And we also have to highlight that the implementation of these materials requires the teachers: curiosity, motivation and technical and didactic training.