Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have become popular and are proliferating schools all around the globe. They are continually gaining popularity due to the fact that you can manipulate the presentation from both the board and the computer. These boards are an interesting way to capture the attention of students but unfortunately, teachers don't maximize their potential. If you are an online teacher and wish to get more out of your interactive whiteboards then here are some great ways to do that.

Capture clips of your lessons

These boards have embedded software that can capture both the audio and video of the screen. You can use this feature to record interesting topics or the hard-to-get concepts and send them to your students to ease the understanding of the content. There are also other screen recording features like jing or Quicktime X that you can use to record clips that you may integrate into your presentation.

Use the vendor resources

IWB vendors have sites that can provide additional resources to assist in your teaching experience. Tutorials and interactive assessments from the vendors can prove to be useful in learning how to explore the board. You can also get flipcharts, smart notebooks or even download lessons and save them directly to your computer to better your class presentations. Some sites also have additional blogs and forums that enable you to communicate with other educators. This comes in handy when you want troubleshoot or get a better understanding of your board.

Online interactives

There are also a wide plethora of online activities you can perform with these IWBs to further enhance the understanding of your students. You can take virtual tours to locations such as the White House that you wish to teach them about. These tours can also be a good method to keep your students prepared when you are about to visit a certain location. 

Encourage competition

Fun is an integral part of the learning process and one way to do this is to create competition between the students. Divide the students into groups and introduce competition between them. Sites like Wii and Kinet will enable you to efficiently use IWBs enable fun interaction using physical response techniques while still keeping the lesson educative. However, remember to give guidelines to maintain healthy fun and not overdo it. An example of a good instruction to give would be to ensure the activity covers all the vocabulary taught in a unit.

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