The past couple of decades have shown that the pace at which technology has influenced teaching and learning is moving at hyper speed, and within the past two years – warp speed. Not only have this generation’s students grown up in a technology-rich environment, but they also benefit from lessons and activities that are interactive and immersive. Educators have seen the advantages of implementing educational technology, like interactive whiteboards, that offers students multiple opportunities to engage and collaborate with others.  

We all know that uneasy feeling of sitting in front of a blank white screen trying to decide where to begin when it comes to designing and creating an interactive lesson. You can feel it just thinking about it, right? We also know how tough it can be to look at lesson after lesson on the web or an IWB website trying to decide if a lesson is good and whether or not it will be engaging for your students.

Interactive whiteboards give us an opportunity to excite our students about learning through multi-sensory, hands-on interaction with content, so we want to be sure that the lessons that we create and use for instruction are high-quality and engaging. Here are some design components that will help you create and/or choose lessons that achieve positive learning outcomes with your students.

November is here and the holidays are quickly approaching, but there’s still plenty of learning and teaching time before the break! Here are our top tips to help you create engaging lessons all month long.

Be sure to check out the latest content for November on MimioConnect™ , our interactive teaching community, to help you get started on the right track:

Which Interactive Solution Is Right for Your School?

Interactive technologies offer an effective, engaging, and easy way to provide teacher-led instruction. Whole-class tools are designed to put students at the center of the educational environment, so they’re more engaged, more collaborative, and more motivated.

There’s a wide array of choices when it comes to whole-class technology, which you can read about in our recent blog articles: portable IWBs, interactive projectors (standard and laser), touch boards, and flat panel displays. Some of the most important considerations are what will work for your classroom configurations and for the teaching and learning styles of your educators and students.

Whole-class learning is a key aspect of the modern classroom, but how do you find the right solution for your school? There are a variety of options, so you need to take a closer look at each one to determine which is the best choice for your students, teachers, curriculum, and budget.

The search for the new interactive classroom technology can be incredibly daunting. How do you know what’s right for your school? How do you differentiate between the various solutions available? Will it be simple for both teachers and students to use? And how do you find the best solution to fit your budget?

The challenge in every classroom is to keep each student moving steadily toward proficiency in his or her learning. We have all witnessed how personalized learning—with the teacher, alone, or in small groups—can meet this challenge, but I think we can also agree that some learning is best accomplished with everyone working together.

Interactive whiteboards are fantastic tools, providing educators with a more engaging way to teach. With so many features to choose from, how can you best put these tools to use in the classroom? Here are some of our favorite resources with ideas and recommendations to help you use interactive whiteboards effectively in order to increase learning and engagement with your students.

Those of you who aren’t social studies teachers may be inclined to skip over this blog post, thinking it doesn’t pertain to you. Still others may be saying, “Why bother teaching current events at all?” After all, with the 24-hour news cycle, nothing stays “current” for long! However, research indicates that a regular dose of current events has a multitude of benefits, even in classes outside of social studies.

So you're planning to bring touch-enabled collaborative learning to your classrooms with a touch projector. You're expecting to use the touch projector to turn your current conventional dry erase board into a touch board. But not so fast! Touch projectors have special requirements that need to be accommodated to ensure proper operation – and the whiteboard is an often unrecognized but critical system component. Choosing the right whiteboard and properly installing it are key. Consider the following points before you buy.