interactive whiteboards in the classroom

Interactive Whiteboards in the Classroom

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interactive whiteboards in the classroom

Imagine that you are a child sitting at your desk in a classroom waiting to start the day…

The teacher walks in, presses a button, and all of a sudden you and your classmates are teleconferencing with another classroom across the world in China for your social studies lesson. When you move on to math, the teacher displays multiplication tables on the same board and you and your classmates go up to the front of the room and take turns dragging and dropping the correct answers. The English lesson is exciting, too, because you get to read a book along with your class on the board, complete with pictures, right from your desk. At the end of the day, your teacher emails an absent classmate an audiovisual recording of everything that happened on the board that day, so even he doesn’t miss out.

Until recently, this kind of scenario seemed positively futuristic. With the incredible technology of interactive whiteboards (IWBs), it looks like the future is here.

For the past 20 years, interactive whiteboards have made their way into classrooms across the globe. In many K-12 schools, the traditional blackboard has been phased out entirely by the IWB because of the latter’s innovative flexibility.

Structurally, your general IWB is a large screen placed at the front of a classroom (or boardroom.) Many have desktop or tablet hubs from which the instructor writes on and navigates across programs and the web for students to see.

The uses and benefits of interactive whiteboards in the classroom are many:

-Presentations

-Ability to record information and lessons for those not in class

-Digital Storytelling -Teaching the fundamentals of Internet navigation in real time

-Demonstrating the correct usage of editing marks on typed text for the whole class to see.

Perhaps the most important contribution of interactive whiteboards to education is how readily they appeal to diverse learning styles in the classroom. For instance, in a classroom with a traditional blackboard, an audio learner is likely to be less intellectually stimulated than a student who is visual or tactile. An interactive whiteboard allows the teacher to integrate sound bytes in the form of music and video clips to instruct the audio learner more effectively and with ease. The interactive whiteboard is especially helpful to tactile learners because it gives them the ability to drag, drop, draw, and erase more clearly and decisively than they might on a blackboard.

We can’t underestimate the value of this technology in the classroom for a generation of students that is readily responsive to the Internet, touch screens, and everything digital. Interactive whiteboards meet children where they are cognitively, and they afford teachers a seemingly endless horizon of creative possibilities.

BCS is a first class proprietor of interactive whiteboards and we can answer any questions you may have about choosing, installing, and using an IWB in your classroom or office. Call us today.

image source: www.edudemic.com

source: http://www.rmtc.fsdb.k12.fl.us

BYOD Policy and Your Wireless Network

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We live in an increasingly interconnected world and the line between people’s work lives and their personal lives becomes blurrier every day.  In the workplace, this “Work 3.0” culture translates to the common practice of employees using their personal technology (smartphones, laptops, etc.) to access the corporate wireless network both in the office and out of the office.  It used to be that employees came in at 9 a.m. with their company issued cell phones to sit in their company-issued cubicles and work at their company-issued desktop computers. At five, those employees went home—and more or less left work at the workplace.

 

These days, thanks to the consumerization of technology, corporate employees have no reservations about accessing company information and enterprise via their own smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers from the office, from home, or from the coffee shop down the street. Check out this breakdown of employee behavior on personal devices:

 source

While this culture enhances productivity and the flexibility of employee daily life, it presents a huge security challenge for IT professionals who must attempt to protect company information on a number of vastly different devices on and off of the network. It’s enough to make a CIO want to throw their hands up and ban all personal devices from accessing the server on the wireless network—which is a strategic option. The problem is that too many companies neglect to form any kind of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy at all, thus putting their sensitive data at great risk. Mitigate the risks associated with BYOD and reap the productivity benefits by following these three steps:

 

Define your policy

Weigh the pros and cons of BYOD for your business if you haven’t already. Are the productivity gains and the lower hardware costs worth the headache of Mobile Device Management (MDM) across myriad platforms for your IT department? Your policy is likely to fall in a grey area between total tech license for employees and total barring of non-company owned devices from the wireless network.

 

Promulgate your policy

You can develop the clearest, most reasonable BYOD policy out there, but if your employees are unaware of it, your efforts will be wasted. In our last blog post we talked about the importance of well-structured business-IT alignment, and the need for a top to bottom understanding of BYOD policy is a perfect example of why said alignment matters. When everyone is on the same page, your sensitive data is safer.

 

Enforce your policy

Once your BYOD policy is well known by all involved in the organization, enforcement of it becomes top priority. Of course, most of the continued implementation relies on experts in IT who must ensure that all firewalls and encryption mechanisms are in good working order.

 

How solid is your BYOD policy? Or perhaps it’s better to ask, how safe is your sensitive data on the wireless network? Let BCS provide you with a free IT consultation. We can help you decide the best course of action for a BYOD policy and provide wireless network monitoring solutions for your company. With these services, you can rest assured that no unauthorized device is infringing on your wireless network. Call us today. 757.497.1300.