Interactive whiteboards bring technology to students' fingertips

Andy Hall:

Dane County school districts with interactive whiteboards include Madison, Sun Prairie, Waunakee, Middleton-Cross Plains, Verona, Oregon, McFarland, Stoughton, Cambridge, Mount Horeb and Monona Grove.

Many students have a natural affinity for interactive whiteboards, which are a hybrid between an old-fashioned chalkboard and a computer.

Whatever can be shown on a computer can be projected onto the whiteboard, about six feet wide and four feet tall.

"It's got that technological kind of buzz to it that really attracts them," said Jeff Horney, learning coordinator at Cherokee on the city's West Side. The school has four interactive whiteboards and more are on the way, thanks to help from foundation grants and the school's Parent Teacher Organization.

And West High School has received a $91,000 grant from the California-based Tosa Foundation to replace dusty chalkboards with interactive whiteboards.

In Aegerter's classroom, seventh-grader Clayton Zimmerman showed his classmates every step of a science experiment, tapping his finger on the screen's images to remove a stopper from the top of a bottle and drag it off to the side.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 12, 2008 1:33 AM
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