Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: May 20th, 2010 
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How much is an interactive whiteboard? How about £5? In fact, for that price, you can have an easily portable interactive whiteboard. Interested?
Actually, I’m cheating a little: I’m assuming that you already have a classroom with a projector and either a laptop or desktop computer (which is the case in almost every classroom in my school). If you have, then you just need to add one cheap and cheerful wireless mouse.
I bought a few mice to try out Mouse Mischief (which is brilliant – I’ll post about that later), but then I realized that even one wireless mouse could be a pretty useful teaching tool that allows students to interact with any program. I just pass the wireless mouse to a student and they can use it to interact with whatever is on the board: that could be selecting answers; completing drag and drop tasks; playing educational games or doing anything else that the touch surface on an interactive whiteboard would allow.
I’ve tried this with several classes and it’s worked brilliantly—students pass the mouse to one another with less disruption than when they come out to the whiteboard. Since the students aren’t standing in front of the whiteboard there are no issues with shadows or other class members being unable to see. Some students who are extremely reluctant to come out to the board will happily use the mouse from their seat.
Only one student can use the mouse at a time – but since most interactive whiteboards can only be used by student at a time, that’s not really a great disadvantage.
As a teacher, I can easily take back control at any time—all I have to do is unplug the receiver for the wireless mouse.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this—in fact I can’t believe this idea has only just occurred to me—but it’s been a really effective way to involve students. I’m sure I’ll be doing this a lot in future. In fact I have a strong suspicion that I may have rendered my very expensive SMARTboard redundant. Mind you, there are no SMARTboards at the school where I’m working from September. I’ll just take my £5 mouse.
Photo: Cheesy Catand Mouse Pic by fozzeee on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons Licence.
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Great insight. I started my journey with teaching with interactive content with a projector and wireless mouse that I passed from student to student. My students were so motivated to participate when technology was involved.
I share this technique during all of my interactive content presentations at conferences and in classrooms. Many of the teachers haven’t thought to use a wirless mouse either!:) Thanks for sharing!
Hi Lois
I remember when I was doing my PGCE a few years back one of the other trainees did an experiment with his class and wanted them to enter the data into a spreadsheet. What he did was pass around a wireless mouse and keyboard so they could put their stats in. He said it went very well. Generally I guess you would use the mouse more than the keyboard but there might be a place for it too.
Have been doing this for a while using a keyboard/mousepad combo. Works v. well – just remember if you’re getting several for use be a department in rooms close together – get ones which operate on different frequencies because they can interfere with each other.
I like the idea of adding in a wireless keyboard as well – that would actually be an improvement over using a SMARTboard (which has a keyboard built in, but I find it a pain to use).
Thanks – I’ll be trying that.
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