Week #3: Interactive Whiteboard Article

I read an article this week from the about interactive white boards and specific examples of how they affected learning in the classroom. A link is provided below for the article. Focusing on an urban elementary school in the southeast, the author mentioned the use of interactive whiteboards in a special education class. It is easy to see how using interactive whiteboards can help those with special needs learn better by feeling the learning space and being able to interact with it at their height and interest. The author mentioned benefits of the board for students with vision and hearing losses but did not go into detail. I would be interested to see how specifically these students learned better with the new technology.
For other classrooms I learned that the interactive white board is used to show multimedia presentations to everyone at one time. At first I thought, "yea, we have been able to watch DVDs and such in classrooms for a while..." but then I realized that we could use one screen to quickly jump over to the Internet and pull up the additional resources a textbook has online or a YouTube video that would be of interest. You could even write comments on a side notebook space while watching the video. The interactive white boards have taken resources we've always had and made them more accessible and easier to present to the whole class.
The last comment I would like to make on this article was the discussion of teaching search engine validity with an interactive whiteboard. In the example, the teacher was going through an Internet search process on the whiteboard and voicing her though process. She modeled a poor search and an efficient search. I remember learning how to search the web as being a difficult thing to understand in my school years. It would have been easier to obtain this all-inclusive guide rather than the "figure it out on your own, I'll walk around if you need help" approach.
In summary, all the examples I read about increased my attraction to interactive whiteboards. I believe they are an excellent way to involve children directly with their learning in an attractive (almost sneaky!) way, and help them feel and touch and manipulate the things they need to understand an objective.

Article Link