Interactive Whiteboard

An ICT tool that is interesting for teacher to be used in classroom nowadays is interactive whiteboard. An interactive whiteboard is a large, touch-sensitive board which allows teachers and students to participate interactively in activities that are projected onto it by using a projector that connected to a computer. Hence, we can say that an interactive whiteboard consists of a computer, a data projector and a touch-sensitive whiteboard.

The board’s surface acts like the computer’s desktop where the teacher and students can control the computer directly using either a pen, finger or other gadgets. Actually, some of you may wonder, what is the advantage of using such a board in classroom? If we compared the normal traditional black or white board, interactive whiteboard has the advantages for superior presentation opportunities, and it can help the teacher in it’s’ readily availability of teaching materials.

            Teachers can develop interactive whiteboard multimedia presentations or use the ready-made presentations for the class. Interactive whiteboards help the teacher to explain process or other change in an illustration way so that the students can be clearer about the content being taught by the teacher.

            In the traditional way where black/white board or simple projector methods, the students need to jot down the exercises shown in their exercise book before proceed to solve it and present to the whole class. This is actually time consuming as the teaching lesson will be delay. However, with the help of interactive whiteboard, the students can interact directly with the exercise shown and present it to the class in short time. It can increase the efficiency of the teaching and learning lesson.

            Besides that, interactive whiteboard also have been proven to increase the student attention, engagement, motivation and enjoyment in the learning process. It also has increase the students learning ability as the students pay more attention to the lesson. In addition, for those students that has hearing and visual impairment also get the benefit from this whiteboard.

            As a conclusion, interactive whiteboard is a very interactive and useful tool for the teacher to use in their teaching process in the classroom. For Malaysia, our education still not yet uses this tool in a large scale due to its cost. Only certain universities and education institution have this tool. However, it is believe that in future, this type of whiteboard will be used by all level of education institution as the advantages of it is better.