As schools move progressively into a digital learning environment, interactive whiteboards are being widely adopted in primary and secondary classrooms." (Department of Education and Training,2009). Interactive Whiteboards, or Smartboards as they are sometimes referred to, offer students a hands-on learning experience over all Key Learning Areas. Although they have been in circuit for 10 years, they are only now being utilised for the potential learning and educational purposes. From the research that I have sourced, I can see endless opportunities. The following website edna.edu.au contains innovative links to applications and websites that incorporates the use of interactive whiteboards within the classroom.
Brown (n.d.) lists a range of benefits for using interactive whiteboards in the classroom, some of these include:
• enhanced presentations by integrating a variety of materials such as pictures, graphs and links to websites.
• create customised learning objects to suit the class needs.
• student collaboration.
• broaden the use of ICTs and alternative modes of delivery.
I was lucky enough to be in a classroom last week where I witnessed an innovative way to use the interactive whiteboards during a mathematics lesson. In this lesson, the teacher used a hundredths grid to teach the concept of decimal numbers. She encouraged individual students to colour the squares to represent the numbers and asked other students to provide numbers for representation. I found this helped with the learners' understanding through the use of interactive hands-on materials as well as peer tutoring. I pondered on the engagement of the children and realised how keen they were to use the ‘new toy’. The teacher was having trouble getting it to work properly and the students relished in showing her what to do.

Inexperience is one of the main reasons that interactive whiteboards are not used to their full potential in the modern day classroom. When searching ‘the learning place’ website for information regarding Interactive whiteboards, I came across this ICT Learning and innovation Centre that was designed by The Department of Education and Training in an effort to “promote the innovative use of ICT to enhance modern teaching and learning in the classroom” through professional development sessions and up to date research.