Students love learning with computerized 'whiteboards'

By Hannah Sampson 
Miami Herald
October 18, 2007  

 

 

 

 Photo by Emily Michot/Miami Herald

Gia Arena, 6, a first-grader at Fox Trail Elementary in Davie, uses a special pen on the computerized Activboard to move a picture into the correct letter group.

It's spelling time for a group of first-graders at Fox Trail Elementary School in Davie, but pencils and paper are nowhere in sight.

Instead, the 6-year-olds gather at their classroom's computerized whiteboard, dragging pictures into groups by tracing a high-tech ''pen'' across the surface. If they don't know the word, they tap the image to hear a recording of their teacher pronouncing it.

That's when they spell.

''All you do is press the pencil, and you pick your color and you write it,'' said Gia Arena, 6, one of a generation of students who will never suffer the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

As schools nationwide outfit classrooms with new technology to reach kids raised on computers and video games, they are embracing interactive whiteboards that can search the Internet, measure angles with a virtual protractor and turn language arts into a bridge-building activity.

''It's engaging the students. It's exciting. It brings them into the learning,'' said Linda Chuckman, principal of Fox Trail, 1250 Nob Hill Rd. She asked the school's PTSA to raise enough money for all classrooms to have a board. "What you can do with this is truly limitless.''

The boards, connected to a computer and projector, allow teachers to surf the Web in front of the whole class to illustrate a lesson -- playing video clips of science experiments, for example, or finding a map to show exactly where a battle took place for a history class.

Worldwide, more than 1.2 million computerized boards are installed, mostly in kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms, according to Decision Tree Consulting, a market-research company based in England. By 2011, that number is expected to be 5.3 million.

In the United States, sales of interactive whiteboards have soared since 2000, when a little more than 14,200 were sold. DTC estimates that by the end of this year, more than 148,000 boards will be sold nationwide.

In South Florida, the computerized boards are being used in hundreds of classrooms. About 1,200 are being used in 160 schools in Broward County. The interactive whiteboards are also being used in Miami-Dade's 34 new schools and new school additions, many of them in inner-city neighborhoods. Some of the district's older schools also have purchased the boards.