Personalized Whiteboards

Most of you have thought about personalized white boards, and I have thought about them as well. So this past year I decided I was going to make the plunge. I was needing a new way to assess my students every day for retention, but I didn't really know how or what I needed to do. In a traditional classroom it is difficult to know if every child is getting what you are teaching. There is always the one student who is always willing to answer the question, and you do have students that will answer if you call on them. I just needed a way to reach all my students. So one day my wife had looked on Pinterest and found some ideas, and the personalized white board really stuck out to me.  I purchased a classroom set of thirty from Amazon.com for around $30 that is around a dollar a board. I went with these due to the cost, and as a teacher we all know how much we spend in our own money every year.

 I took this year to see how my students would respond to the boards. I teach high school juniors and introducing something like this could be very tricky. They might feel that this is very elementary or just might not like doing it because it doesn't look cool. These were some of the issues I had come in contact with when I introduced them. Once I assured them this will benefit them they were more willing to use them.  I used the white boards as a way to assess my student's almost everyday. This gave me a great ability to see who was learning and what they did know. This also allows myself to change the way I teach while throughout the lesson. There were times I would go without using the boards to see if there is a difference in the learning. Students would not seem to be interested when we didn't use them, I feel they felt they could be invisible again if they didn't use them. I can assure you this does make students more accountable throughout the lesson and scores were higher when I used the boards than when I didn't.

 I do highly recommend if you can afford whiteboards to use them. These are great tools you can use everyday no matter what subject you teach. I have talked to some of the math teachers in my school and they have considered using this in their classroom as well. I hope you all enjoy the insights I have come across and I hope these will help make decisions for your classroom.

Here is a link where I found my whiteboards.  http://www.amazon.com/NEOPlex-Student-Laptop-Erase-Marker/dp/B001EW9I4W/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1371149616&sr=8-4&keywords=personal+whiteboard