6 Ways to Use a Whiteboard in the Classroom

6 Ways to Use a Whiteboard in the Classroom

The modern classroom is full of tools and techniques to keep children engaged and learning from 9 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. Ensuring children are absorbing the information teachers are teaching is of vital importance for everyone involved; a good education is often a foundation for everything else, after all.

So how can schools and teachers be using the humble whiteboard for maximum impact?

Create a list

Whiteboards are a great tool to display non-permanent messages. This means that lists can be very useful. Whether it’s a list of the students that are absent for the day, those who have misbehaved, a list of lessons or something else entirely.

Create a calendar

Using a magnetic whiteboard in a variety of other ways means that children can be consistently engaged – instead of losing focus periodically throughout the day.

To ensure that learning is fun, teachers need to think of versatile ways to use what they have. Turning a whiteboard into a calendar, for example, is one way to visualise a timeline or timetable and help children to remember important information.

Using a magnetic whiteboard this way also means that teachers and students alike can pin important information to the board using magnetics.

Get everyone involved

Brainstorming on a whiteboard is a great way to get everyone involved. It’s much more engaging than simply listening to someone drone on or watching someone write on a board. Brainstorms are useful for a number of reasons, engagement being just one benefit.

Getting everyone involved this way not only creates a more positive learning environment but is also likely to inject some enthusiasm into the day.

Give the kids autonomy

At the end of the day, no matter how much you talk at children, they’re going to need to do something on their own. Autonomy and independence are incredibly important in child development and so think about including mobile whiteboards, or handheld whiteboards, as a learning activity.

Children can work together in groups to come up with ideas or you can set specific tasks to encourage confidence, and this also provides an easier way to assess individual progress.

To bring everything together

At the end of the day, you want to be able to ensure the class has learned what you set out to teach them. Bringing everyone together and listing what the class has learned throughout that particular lesson or the whole day can be a nice way to tie everything together and remind the students exactly what it is they’ve been working on.

To give purpose

Likewise to the previous point of bringing things together, you can start off by identifying what the learning objectives for the day are and thus drive purpose. This not only allows the children to better understand what will happen during the day but can be turned into a mini activity where students become involved in identifying what those objectives will be and how they might be achieved.