Video: Learning the ABCs on Interactive Whiteboards
K-12 Tech Decisions
Framingham, MA – April 4, 2012 -- Interactive whiteboards and their related technologies have exploded throughout education in recent years, but they are not often used at the kindergarten level.
At Charlotte Dunning Elementary School in Framingham, MA, they are.
A: “Save and distribute electronic notes from meetings. Enable active collaboration in meetings. Encourage delegate participation in training sessions.” - Kevin Donaghy, Director, Virtual Channel Ltd.
Kindergarten teacher Lori Casavant uses a MimioPad wireless tablet to trace letters along dotted lines that appear—via a laptop running MimioStudio software that is hooked up to a projector—on a whiteboard at the front of the room to teach the building blocks of education.
On Tuesday, April 4, Casavant scrawled the letters on her tablet and patrolled her classroom, checking on her students individually in a way that she wouldn’t be able to if she were anchored, with a piece of chalk or a dry-erase marker in hand, to the front of the room.
“I do it first and then I have them do it on their paper,” she said. “I have really noticed a huge increase in their ability… just from doing this. We did it with numbers. We also did it with letters.”
Installing and running the interactive whiteboards and their software for several classrooms in the school required clearing space on the school’s virtual servers, not to mention reshuffling her technology budget and getting donations, said Kim Taylor, the principal of Dunning elementary. The investment of time and money has been well worth it, she said.
“It’s a teacher-driven, grass-roots effort that has just caught wildfire,” Taylor said.
And while Dunning elementary isn’t the only school out there whose kindergarteners use interactive whiteboards in their lessons, Tuesday morning was the first time that Mimio Product Marketing Manager Colleen Ayres had seen it happen in person.
“[To] see a kindergarten teacher using Mimio to demonstrate letter writing was pretty cool for me,” she said.