If your school has recently acquired (an) electronic board(s), here are a few tips on getting things up and running with the board:
• Check what resources come with the board software and make sure they have been installed on the system by your IT person – there will certainly be a selection of templates, backgrounds, shapes, images etc which will prove useful and save time in the preparation of ‘flipcharts’ (documents).
• Make sure all teachers know how to download the software onto their home computer – usually a very straightforward process from the company’s website. There will be a much better take-up among teachers (as well as faster progress in the use of the software) if they can practise at home.
• Check what flipcharts are available (a) on the website (b) on xtec
• Promote a SHARING CULTURE in your centre if one does not already exist– keep shared flipcharts in an easy-to-find folder or on Moodle – this makes the individual workload much smaller! If I prepare a flipchart about the past tense of irregular verbs, for example, I am happy to share it, as I am likely to get plenty of other flipcharts back in return – who’s got something on the conditional? relative pronouns? etc
• Most important of all - make sure TRAINING is available for all teachers – I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: it seems such an obvious point but in a lot of schools that I know of, it seems that this step has been given much less importance than it deserves or even left out altogether!
• (a) there should be a simple initiation session first with the ICT technician (switching on, opening the software, the functions of the data projector, how is and where to save documents in the file system etc), and then…
• (b), more importantly, pedagogical training in step-by-step stages – if this is done in a 1- or 2-day intensive at the start of term (for example, when teachers are preparing for the imminent academic year in the 1st week of September), there will almost certainly be information overload for most teachers and it can be off-putting and even stressful. My suggestion would be to organise a series of, say, four 2-hour sessions on a Friday afternoon (e.g.), not weekly but every 3 or 4 weeks, with an increasing level of difficulty. After session 1, teachers will have 3 weeks to practise the basic skills that have been dealt with and will then feel confident and ready to move on to the next stage, and so on with the other sessions. In addition, if teachers know that they do not have to devote every Friday afternoon, at the end of a hard working week, to IWB training, it is much more likely to get more teachers on board – and keep them on board!
• Most if not all IWB software now incorporates an export feature, meaning that the documents prepared for use with the board can be transformed into other formats, such as Word, Power Point, pdf (Adobe Reader) etc. – this is useful if, for example, you wanted to send a page, or a whole flipchart, to your class via e-mail or paste it up on your Moodle if you have one. I sometimes make a pact with my classes: if they promise to just look at the board and not copy the answers from it while we are doing, say, an error correction exercise in class (and therefore, I hope, improving their concentration levels and reinforcing pair or group work), I will send them the solution to the exercise in pdf format so that they can refer to it whenever they want and keep a record of what we have done. In most cases, this has proved quite a popular ‘trade-off’!
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