White Boards

I love to use technology in my classroom and at home. I have multiple tablets, Apple TV, Tivo's, a smart projector and my smart phone hard at work on a daily basis and I plan to write about how I use that technology in a future blog post. Today, however, I am going to focus on the low tech, but high impact use of white boards. Whether you are in the classroom or home schooling, white boards have a myriad of creative uses that instantly increase engagement for your students.

White Board Purchases
I have three different size white boards sets in my classroom. The largest, as seen in the picture above, are 23" x 31". These are available from White Boards USA http://www.whiteboardsusa.com/ and are fantastic in group work activities. I have a second set of slightly smaller group boards that I had cut from shower board at Lowe's. I had one $10 board cut into 8 equal sections. They are not the same finished product as the ones purchased as white boards, but they still work well. Lastly, I used the same shower board from Lowe's to make individual white boards for each student. They are about 14" x 11". I have one under every desk in a 2 gallon zip-top bag with a black dry erase marker and a piece of felt to use as an eraser. The markers are a bit of an expense, but this year I added dry erase marker as an optional school supply that my students needed for class and I have been pleasantly surprised by how many brought in their own and how they love to use their colored markers to express themselves!
 The uses for white boards are truly endless. They are well used at the beginning of a unit to elicit students preconceptions about a topic, used during a unit to practice concepts or problems and are always used at the end of my units in a white board review.

Why White Boards?
1. Students love them! They ask to use them constantly and are always excited when I tell them to grab their white board and ______________.

2. There is a sense that answers on a white board are not permanent and therefore less threatening as opposed to putting an answer on a sheet of paper.

3. Students can share their thinking with others. The vast majority of times that I use white boards in my class it is in activities where the expectation is that students will be sharing with other students. This helps to build the classroom community and encourages constructive discourse within the classroom.

White Board Ideas
1. Groups of students can design scientific investigations on a large white board. They can suggest ideas and modify them as the development of the experiment progresses.

2. Students can share predictions of what they believe will occur in a lab or activity.

3. Students can share their understanding of why something occurred. As they explain themselves (developing those communication skills!) they can use the white board to help illustrate their thoughts and help others to understand their thinking.

4. Students can diagram their thinking. Often times it is easier for students to sketch out their thoughts, use arrows to show connections and then write or verbally explain their thinking. Again, the white board is a perfect format for this type of activity because it allows for easy modifications of thought.

5. White board reviews. For almost every unit that I teach, I write a white board review series of questions on Power Point. I flash the questions, one at a time on the screen and then students write their answers on their white boards and hold them up for me to read. I get instant feedback on what they know and what they do not know. It is true that these questions are written so that the answers only require a single word or a short phrase, so I don't get in depth feedback about their true understanding. I do, however, get a feel for where the class is at on each topic and can then ask verbal questions to probe their understanding.

6. Students very often come into my classroom before school, at lunch or after school to get extra help. When working one-on-one or in small groups we often pull out the white board and make our thinking visible to help all understand the concept better.

7. Play Pictionary with the white boards. Place the class into teams and give the drawer for each team a term or concept that they must draw out while their team mates try to guess the answer.

One supposed disadvantage of the white board is that it will be erased and unlike a sheet of paper, you can't  take it home and study it. Or can't you? That is where the technology jumps in. Students very often use their cell phones to take pictures of their white boards so there is a permanent record of their thinking. I have also often taken pictures of white boards to share with classes. At times I have used them as a timeline of the progression of thought as we have moved through a unit. I have also posted pictures of two white boards next to each other allowing students the opportunities to compare the thinking displayed on each.