Touch boards are driving group learning to a new level of relevance and engagement. The latest touch displays allow all students – including those with disabilities – to become more engaged with the curriculum being taught. These interactive boards are intuitive technologies that allow students to experience touch, gestures, and engagement with the content, the learning, and each other in new ways.

Below are some of the key benefits offered by interactive touch boards:

1. Engagement is dramatically heightened with multiple touch and gesture interactivity.
2. Collaboration is brought to a new level, with the ability to have up to six different students or student/teacher combinations working together in real time on the board.  

3. Students with disabilities can enjoy real advantages
   

   • They are helped to feel more connected.
   • Students who are typically reserved tend to become more involved.
   • Touch technology often helps students to tune out distracting stimuli and focus more on the task at hand.
4. Increased involvement, self-confidence, and expression skills, through opportunities for students to use more intuitive technology to create engaging presentations for class, and to participate in truly collaborative learning.  
5. Benefits for kinesthetic learners, helping them to learn more easily.
   • Kinesthetic learners are students who need to move – who have trouble sitting still at their desks. They appreciate the ability to get up and interact physically with this technology.
   • Kinesthetic learners learn by doing. This technology provides real opportunities to be “doing things” at the front of the classroom display, versus just taking in a lecture from their desk.
6. Meeting students where they are in personal technology use. Many schools are
   behind the curve on technology adoption vs. students’ own level of tech knowledge. Interactive touch boards bridge that gap with their highly interactive interface, mimicking the touch technology they are already using on their phones and tablets.  

A view to the future  
The rapid acceleration of “intuitive technology” is providing a learning experience in which students interact with devices entirely through natural movements and gestures, according to the authors of the 2014 NMC Horizon report. Based on the research of the NMC team, intuitive technology is a long-range trend that will be commonplace in schools within five or more years. The authors state that “motion-based technology through smartphones, tablets, and even game systems allows learners to engage freely.”¹ “Examples given in the report refer to children using multi-touch walls and interactive displays at museums, and teachers in Virginia using games with motion-based technology to improve the social and verbal communication skills of students with autism spectrum disorders,” according to EdWeek’s blog by Danielle Wilson on June 20, 2014.² Interactive touch boards provide some of the first steps in this new method of engaging students through gestures and touch, helping to seed the intuitive technologies of the future.

Mimio releases new 6-point Touch 360° touch board
Mimio understands that to meet the need for touch technology, schools need to have options – from  HD touch displays to touch boards that can also be leveraged as conventional whiteboards. We have just released another option for our interactive displays: the MimioBoard touch board, which lets up to six single-point touch users or three dual-touch and gestures users engage in small-group or whole-group learning simultaneously. To learn more about this collaborative solution, click here.>>

¹ http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2014-nmc-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf

² http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2014/06/intuitive_technology_use_and_hybrid_learning_are_predicted_education_trends.html?qs=interactive+displays