Interactive Whiteboards Explained

Interactive Whiteboards are making learning more interesting and conference meetings more effective. With an interactive whiteboard, you can add content, notes, web pages, graphs and increase the interest of your targeted audience and turning them into active participants in your presentation. In addition, you can print out and email or hand out the final product at the completion of the presentation after saving it to the computer. This is effective in classrooms so students pay more attention to the lecture than taking notes because they receive the updates at the end of class.

If you are holding a video conference, much like the conference calls, the other people in distant locations can participate and add notes to your presentation. Sometimes allowing others to participate onscreen can cause confusion because the board gets crowded with notes from others and not just the presenter. With the whiteboard, you can effectively shut others out so they cannot add content and you can select who can add content much the same way that you can silence certain participants from a video conference. In a group team effort, the whiteboard has increased productivity where teams must work together but are not geographically close.

In the classroom, students are learning more and participating with the interactive whiteboard. The presentation itself is more interesting and it enables the student to pay attention to the presenter because they are not taking notes. During the presentation, students have more opportunities to participate and their input is included into the presentation. The original presentation with all notes added to the presentation during the lecture is printable directly from the whiteboard and handed out at the conclusion of class. This has increased learning and retention of material presented. Some classrooms have interactive tablets for the students and the proctor can go around and put an individual's work on the main presentation board.

Interactive whiteboards promote group learning and participation. You can write or draw directly on the board. Some whiteboards have an electronic flipchart with up to 99 pages you can go through onscreen. Whiteboards are portable and moveable from one area to another. The problem with the portable whiteboard is you have to align it each time the whiteboard is moved to a different location. This can be tedious and time consuming.

The interactive whiteboard consists of a computer, the viewing screen, the projector and the related software. The projection can be either front projection or rear projection. The front projection screen is not good if the presenter will be in front of the screen because they will obscure the image.