Innovation Profile 011

Visualisation is important in learning.

Many people learn best by visualising ideas and processes. But it has never been easy for teachers to work on visualisations with students, using the blackboard and paper.

Using an interactive whiteboard makes working with visual images much easier, as well as bringing new tools to manipulate the images. This leads to more effective learning.

Teaching tools such as the SMART Board™ interactive whiteboard have only recently become available and affordable by schools, but teachers are rapidly finding they can enable big improvements in learning.

Young people now expect and respond to visual communication. The interactive whiteboards greatly extend the range of images that can be used effectively with a class of students. They also allow interaction with the visual learning materials in an intuitive, dynamic way, through the board's touch sensitive surface.

Schools can organise equipment so that teachers can quickly capture and incorporate images into their teaching materials. Many different kinds of images can be accessed ready-made from the world-wide web, or they can be scanned, or taken from a video or by camera. Diagrams that teachers would previously have drawn on the blackboard can be presented instantly to the class (and saved for next time).

Teachers are also finding that the whiteboards help to focus and hold the attention of students. The ability to dynamically highlight important points using the whiteboard tools can make explanations much more clear, so they can better follow the lesson.

Though some uses of ICT in learning take a long time to become properly integrated into teaching approaches, it is noticeable that adoption of whiteboards is happening much faster. This is probably because they fit so well with the ways that teachers already work. News about this is spreading from schools in the USA and Canada that were first to use whiteboards, to European schools. There is considerable discussion now happening in some European countries about how whiteboards can be used most effectively.

Information about interactive whiteboards and profiles of how they can be used to teach classes such as chemistry, pupils with special needs, poetry, and many other examples, can be found on the SMART Technologies web sites, www.smarttech.com, www.smarttech.de and www.smartboard.co.uk