Sunday, January 10th, 2010 | IWBs
The inability to read is one of the greatest problems that education is facing – children simply can’t read with comprehension. And when they can’t read, they battle with the rest of their schoolwork. Learning resources given to learners – including textbooks and the internet – are wasted on them if they can’t read and understand what they are reading.
An interactive whiteboard is a perfect tool to help you to improve the literacy rate of your learners. It allows you to engage in a variety of activities, which will improve their reading skills. Talk to your peers or look on the internet for ideas, and let your interactive whiteboard – and your imagination – do the rest.
The look-say-cover-write-check method is used by many teachers with great success to teach learners to recognize words and word patterns. This can be done with boards and cards, but an interactive whiteboard makes the process much easier. With little effort you can prepare an activity which will allow you to do the following:
- Write a word on the board and allow learners to look at it.
- Say the word aloud to the learners. Let them repeat the word aloud.
- Cover the word. Most interactive whiteboards come with software that allows you to slide a colored strip over the word to hide it.
- Let the learners write the word – if you are teaching an individual or a small group of learners, the word can be written on the interactive whiteboard – otherwise let them write the word in their workbooks.
- Reveal the word by sliding the cover away. Let the learners check if the word they wrote down is correct.
Difficult? Not at all. In fact, it is very simple. And that is the power of the interactive whiteboard – it makes activities which can have extraordinary results simple to perform. With a board in your classroom you can repeat this activity throughout the day, whenever appropriate – in this way literacy training becomes a part of your daily activities.
The unique features of an interactive whiteboard, such as drag-and-drop, hide-and-reveal, and allowing touch interactivity, make this device an ideal tool to improve literacy.
Do you have any literacy tips that you would like to share with us?
Click here for more information about interactive whiteboards.
6 Comments to How can an interactive whiteboard be used to improve literacy?
Follow me on Twitter
A calender of all posts to date