IWB Features & applications

Annotate, capture and edit

Everything that is projected on the digiboard, from written text to video images and text, can be annotated using words, arrows or lines. Because you can ‘take pictures' of (parts of) the screen, elements from other sources such as Web pages and other software such as MS Word or subject-specific courseware can be used.

Curriculum examples

• Vocabulary acquisition
  Images and relevant parts of  webpages can be captured and edited to support revision activities of newly introduced words.
  To locate and select suitable materials image repositories can also be used.

Practices

• Revision of newly introduced vocabulary:
  Italian fruit names (Smart Notebook file)

Marking, dragging objects and the use of colour.

Paragraphs, sentences, words and images can be turned into objects and then manipulated: set diagonally, coloured or dragged to a different place. In this way, all text and images can be shifted on the screen independently of each other.
Typical mental activities that one support with this include comparing, sorting, matching and categorization.

Curriculum Examples

An example in this respect is the word web developed with students in a brainstorming session, as an advance organiser to a theme to activate related cognitive schemata.
With the help of colour differences or similarity between concepts can be further underlined. Using colour and animation can highlight morphological and grammatical phenomena.

Practices

Hide and Reveal

By colouring text(parts) or images similar to the background they are put on they become invisible for the students. They are made visible again by dragging them to a section of the digiboard with a different background colour. This is one of the ways key parts of text and / or images that provide answers and solutions can be kept hidden temporarily. With a 'sliding screen' can you gradually reveal larger portions of a page at appropriate moments in the lesson.

Curriculum Examples

These techniques are particularly useful for plenary activities involving text reconstruction, such as gap texts, and to demonstrate and evaluate learning strategy skills such as predicting and guessing unknown text elements. Being able to manipulate words and phrases can help students to verbalise or demonstrate the mental steps that are needed for successful application of this type of strategies. Among other reasons this is why it is important that students, too, learn to handle the board well.

Practices

This practice is for training purposes.

It has demonstrations of techniques and examples of how to engage learners by making personal predictions and use pictures for a fluency activity with familiar content.

Construct and Deconstruct

As all text elements (paragraphs, sentences, words and letters) can be treated as objects they can be manipulated. In this way, all text and images can be shifted on the screen independently of each other.
 

Curriculum examples

Predicting and guessing the meaning of unfamiliar textelements are important learner strategies for reading and listening. Some knowledge about wordformation is helpful in this context. To develop the related skills learners need training  in recognising the various morphemic elements in words. For this learners can be asked to actually handle wordparts and report their thoughts and strategies aloud while doing so.

Practices

This file demonstrates constructing activities at word, sentence and text levels,