Interactive Whiteboards

Interactive whiteboards are an exciting and innovative way to teach lessons and motivate learning. I would definitely want one for my elementary classroom. There are so many ways to design the pages to teach a lesson. There are pre-made interactive pages such as "Hot Spot" and there are many free standing tools to help you design your own page. Even with the pre-designed interactive pages, the teacher can customize that page to fit the needs and content of the class. What I like most about the boards is that it is useful in all subject and content areas. There is no limit to who and how one can use this technology. Another advantage to having this new technology is that it can be used in the classroom in various ways. As listed in the readings, the five basic contexts for the use of IWB are: 1) Teacher as demonstrator; 2) Teacher as modeler; 3) Teacher in control - inviting the pupils (shared); 4) Pupils in control with the "teacher" advising (guided); and, 5) Pupils working independently

I have used one in an adult literacy class before and the students were very intrigued. They were able to come up to the board and write on the various screens. I believe young students will enjoy the interactiveness of it all. However, teachers will have to keep the lessons interesting and entertaining. It will be up to the teachers to learn the various tasks that can be done on the whiteboard or it will be just as mundane and useless as the regular classroom chalkboard. In one of the readings, Hazzard says, “It isn’t about the boards; it’s about the learning that is happening. The boards are a conduit to the curriculum.”

The sad thing about most urban classrooms-and many suburban classrooms-is that by the time these classrooms get the interactive whiteboard technology, the technology will probably be a little outdated. Therefore, teachers must also learn how to fight to get grants that will put these tools in the classroom before they are replaced by the latest technology in the years to come and their students have missed out on innovation-yet again.

PSA Project

My group’s psa project was on the do’s and don’ts of discipline inside today's classroom. The first half was supposed to reflect on times past (such as in the 60’ and 70’s) when students were made to sit in the corner with their faces to the wall or sit with dunce caps on their heads. The second half of the video was to show a more contemporary version of classroom discipline. I really liked the idea but filming it became more a challenge than I expected. While filming it we completely forgot that the video was only supposed to be around a minute. Since we were filming students’ behavior and teacher reactions, the time stretched out a lot. We ended up with over six minutes of video to edit-that was a nightmare because so much had to be cut away. After filming the entire video, I remembered the rule that our instructor told us about checking to be sure we had audio. Well our audio did not record the first three minutes because we had the microphone connected. Luckily I had unplugged it halfway through filming while moving the camera around and forgot to plug it back in. I filmed most of the video myself and tried to remember all of the video tips I had read from the weekly readings. I had to be sure not to cut off anyone’s head or have poles or obstructing objects directly behind the person’s head, the "rule of thirds", etc…

When it came to editing, the process started off simple enough. I really liked the effect we used that made the first part of the video look like a silent film. This worked out well because this is the part of the video that we lost the audio to anyway, and this portion reflected a time period long ago. Again, the hardest part was cutting our footage down to a minute and we lost a lot! In the end it seemed fine but wouldn’t save to my flashdrive. Then my group member tells me that the file became corrupt and we lost all of the audio so she had to redo the entire video! I’m not sure what happened there, but that was disappointing and makes me feel less confident about using this tool in the future. We had even added audio via the microphone on the computer that took a while because we had to keep it under 7 seconds. All was lost.

The hardest part of the editing process was that only person could edit it. Whenever I tried to explain how I thought it should be edited, the editor did it differently and the process became really confusing and frustrating. Overall, I didn’t really enjoy the experience even though I was very excited beforehand. Moviemaker seems simple to use, it's just getting the Audacity site and the royalty free music and other things incorporated in it. Seems like one of those things that has to been done on a regular basis so as to not forget how to do it. I'm sure with a little more practice I could perfect the process and use it in my classroom-at least I hope.