I used to teach with an interactive whiteboard. Then, I went two years without. I learned that I didn’t need it to teach. Chalk and a chalkboard will do the job in a pinch. The students still learned. I still had a projector, too. It was just on a cart. Kids liked to touch it during passing time when I was at my post in the hallway, to mess with the color or language. I tripped over the cord more than a few times. It was more annoying than my former fancy ceiling mounted one, but it was doable for sure. It was more than many other teachers have.

This year, the technology bond in our district rolled into our building. I have a beautiful ceiling-mounted projector once again. Not only that, but it has built in interactive capabilities. I have special stylus type things that will work with it. I can capture what’s on the screen to save for later. Actually, I don’t even know all of the things that it can do yet. We don’t have the HDMI cables yet, so I haven’t had a chance to play around with it. I’m bringing one from home for tomorrow, though.

This interactive projector is the one piece of technology that I am most looking forward to trying this year. I want to use it to write with my students. I can type up a draft while they watch and think-aloud for them to show them that writing isn’t always easy and painless even for an expert. I can annotate what I’m working on or an article that they are reading as they work on it. They can see my annotations as a model for the various Reading Apprenticeship strategies that I teach. I can do all sorts of cool things with Google Earth, which will be especially awesome in my history class. We could use it to revise and edit the school newsletter in my journalism class. I have so many ideas!

Absenteeism is a huge problem in our alternative high school, so I’m even wondering if I can use this to capture lessons in some way. Then, I could post them on my website so that absent students have access to the lesson they missed as well as any handouts they worked on. It still isn’t as good as being there, and there’s no guarantee they would watch it, but some might. It would be like flipping my class, but only for those few who don’t attend regularly. (I’d love to try a whole flipped lesson at some point, but our students are not typically required to do any homework, so I don’t think a flipped lesson would work)

Anyone have any other good uses for an interactive whiteboard in English or history?