How Can Interactive Whiteboards Boost Student Engagement?
When it comes to boosting student engagement, technology in the classroom is a surefire way to achieve this goal. Technology in classrooms is indeed a double-edged sword, but interactive whiteboards have been shown to really boost student participation.
Interactive whiteboards, with their connection to the cloud, their instant access to the internet, and their integration with other electronic devices, encourage students to take a more central role in their own learning process. Interactive whiteboards enhance and augment student learning with very few drawbacks, especially since students are so facile with technology that there’s hardly any learning curve for them when it comes to operating a new device.
We’ve outlined some of the reasons that interactive whiteboards boost student engagement below:
Student Engagement Is Sustained
If a teacher usually writes slowly, that can cause students to disengage from a lesson. But with a whiteboard that can show slides, images, play videos, and animate text, learning can keep pace with the students’ minds in a way that wasn’t possible before.
Catering To Each Type of Learner
Some students are visual learners, others are auditory learners, and still others are kinesthetic. With the option to play sounds, music, and audio recordings for auditory learners while providing exciting images, words, and diagrams for visual learners, an interactive whiteboard addresses the learning styles of a wide range of students. And even kinesthetic learners can receive an advantage from interactive whiteboards when given the chance to interact physically with the board, whether it’s selecting answers to questions or playing a game.
Teachers Can Easily Review Past Material
When a teacher has the entire cloud at their fingertips, they can easily give students a bigger picture of the lesson unit or their course as a whole. They can use the beginning of lessons to review past material and solidify students’ understanding in a way that wasn’t possible before.
Integration with Other Types of Technology
Many students nowadays use computers, laptops, tablets, and even smartphones (when they’re actually supposed to) as learning tools. Syncing up these devices with an interactive whiteboard permits students to answer questions, fill out surveys, give feedback, and share ideas as a group in real-time.
Students Can Take Their Learning Home with Them
Presentations and lessons on interactive whiteboards can be recorded. This way students can access them at any time when they are at home, addressing gaps or weaknesses in their knowledge, boosting not only their engagement but their scores and grades.
Collaboration Is Easier and Encouraged
With an interactive whiteboard, students have the opportunity to collaborate with one another on a presentation in real-time, adding annotations, graphics, and other resources to their material. This gives students equal opportunities to present their ideas, since some students may be more outspoken than others, but some students may enjoy creating beautiful visuals and graphs and explaining what they are all about, and this gives students of all types a chance to shine.
In addition, students may have the ability to cast their own devices to the interactive whiteboard at the front of the classroom, so that everyone can benefit from a video, article, or image they have found that relates to their lesson.
Conclusion and Further Reading
These are just a few of the ways that interactive whiteboards can boost student engagement in the classroom. If you’re interested in reading more about the role of digital signage in student classroom engagement, check out this post on our blog. And if you’re interested in the ways that digital signage affects other industries, not just education, this blog post is a good read.
If you want to know how Haverford Education can help your educational institution bring technology to its students, book a meeting with us to get started.
