Weapon of choice

Me with an incredible weapon

What is your weapon of choice? As an educator, what tool or technology would you never be without in the classroom or learning space?

For me, it is quite simple. My one weapon of choice is a dry wipe board and some pens. If there was nothing else, I could still conduct all my lessons using a board and pen. At a push, a chalkboard would do just as well.

There are so many things you can do with a whiteboard and pens. One of my methods is to provoke a discussion with students and then summarise their comments and arguments on the board. I often catch them taking photos of the board so they can go away and revisit the notes later on. With an interactive whiteboard it's easier - I simply email the screen capture to my students as an attachment. I have written extensively about how I use IWBs in the last few years.

Another method is to get students to use the board to present their ideas. This means sitting down and relinquishing control of the screen to them, something some educators may find uncomfortable. But for me, it's a natural progression - a use of the tool by students to learn for themselves.

There are so many other methods I could write about here, including quizzes, brainstorming sessions, and illustrations/diagrams, but now it's your chance. Please share your 'weapon of choice' below in the comments box. Hopefully we can start a discussion thread about the effectiveness of different technologies, media and tools for education!


Weapon of choice by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.