I am going to discuss electronic white boards for my next blog topic. I have been teaching for 14 years and when I first started, I had two chalkboards in my classroom. Straight up white chalk and erasers. After a few years, we slowly started replacing the chalkboards with whiteboards and a few short years after that we were introduced to the first interactive whiteboards. These were available on a sign-out basis and could be wheeled from classroom to classroom. When they were first introduced to our school, we trained only those teachers who were interested in learning about the new technology. They were tricky to use because if the board was bumped or moved just a small bit, it would no longer be in line with the projector (which, at the time, was also not mounted) and it would need to be re-configured. Over the past few years, our school has been equipped with an interactive whiteboard in each of our classrooms that is mounted to the wall along with a projector that is mounted to the ceiling. I think that the interactive whiteboard has been an excellent resource for educators and for students throughout the learning process.

What is an interactive whiteboard?

An interactive whiteboard is a touch-sensitive screen that communicates and works with a computer and a projector. They were first introduced in education in 1991.
Educators were the first people to recognize the interactive whiteboard’s potential as a tool for collaboration and lesson planning.
An overview of possible uses in our classrooms include:
• Manipulating text and images
• Taking notes and saving them for later use, empaling or print
• Viewing websites as a class
• Interacting physically without having to sit in front of computer
• Creating digital lesson activities with templates, images and multimedia
• Viewing and writing notes over educational video clips
• Using presentation tools 
• Displaying student presentations