Successful Deployment of Interactive Whiteboard

The $50 Interactive Whiteboard in action.

I got a chance to use the $50 Interactive Whiteboard in class today and it worked … eventually. I won’t say there weren’t challenges, but most of them were due to the fact that I had just downloaded everything to my Macbook this morning and wasn’t really comfortable with the setup. It seems that the Wiimote’s bluetooth connection needs to be configured from scratch every time. I’ll soon be very good at doing this quickly, I suspect. Once I get the exact steps figured out, I’ll post them

Yesterday, my Field Experience class took a tour of the Ohio Statehouse and I couldn’t resist including a Hot Potatoes matching activity as part of the Jeopardy PowerPoint game that I created to review the information we covered before and during the trip. The two students who tried it took to the IR pen very naturally, as you can see in the pictures. Their teammates enjoyed cheering them on as they completed the activity.

The only problems were a result of my design. Because I was in a rush, I included the pictures without any editing. Even shrunk to 200 pixels, they were pretty big and the column of five extended below the bottom of the screen. Using thin little scrollbars at the side of a window can be a little too delicate for a student picking up the pen for the first time. I’ve since cropped the pictures. Give it a try!

I plan to try a few more ideas and activities to work the bugs out. Stay tuned