For the past 20 years, interactive whiteboards have made their way into classrooms across the globe. In many K-12 schools, the traditional blackboard has been phased out entirely by the IWB because of the latter’s innovative flexibility.
Structurally, your general IWB is a large screen placed at the front of a classroom (or boardroom.) Many have desktop or tablet hubs from which the instructor writes on and navigates across programs and the web for students to see.
The uses and benefits of interactive whiteboards in the classroom are many:
-Presentations
-Ability to record information and lessons for those not in class
-Digital Storytelling -Teaching the fundamentals of Internet navigation in real time
-Demonstrating the correct usage of editing marks on typed text for the whole class to see.
Perhaps the most important contribution of interactive whiteboards to education is how readily they appeal to diverse learning styles in the classroom. For instance, in a classroom with a traditional blackboard, an audio learner is likely to be less intellectually stimulated than a student who is visual or tactile. An interactive whiteboard allows the teacher to integrate sound bytes in the form of music and video clips to instruct the audio learner more effectively and with ease. The interactive whiteboard is especially helpful to tactile learners because it gives them the ability to drag, drop, draw, and erase more clearly and decisively than they might on a blackboard.
