More than 130 activities as well as tips and suggestions for using the classroom board more effectively and efficiently. This book provides tips and suggestions to help language teachers use their classroom boards more effectively and efficiently. More than 130 activities for the board to help teachers both teach and assess their students are included. These activities will also provide opportunities for students, whatever their age or level of competency, to learn and practice specific lexical, phonetic, or grammatical items; attain increased fluency in their writing, reading, listening, and speaking skills; teach and learn from their peers; practice self-assessment; get to know each other and other cultures better; and have fun during the learning process.
Many of those mentioned methods are way costing time compared to nowadays convenient internet source. Especially true for those who doesn't have any talent in drawing like me.
Technology has changed a great deal since this book was first published back in the late 1990's. The role of the whiteboard in the classroom is still important. However, the use of a projector along with PowerPoint can bring many of the benefits of the whiteboard in a manner that saves time. While creating grids on the board to organize information and vocabulary on the board is a nice idea, the time it takes during class to draw each of these large items is downtime. If you have to draw multiple items during the explanation part of your class, the time that you have your back to the students is a prime time for them to be checking their cell phones or doing something unrelated to class. Presenting this information through PowerPoint will save your class time since the information can instantaneously appear. Additionally, the information in each of the slides can be quickly copied and edited in a document file that the students can fill out while following along with the activity on the projector.
While the concept of having students coming up to the board to write their information is a nice idea, I find it really eats into the students time especially in an institute like mine where there is almost no breathing room in the schedule. In a large classroom full of adults, if there is only three or four people writing on the board, the rest of the students aren't directly participating in the activity. Students paired together and working on a writing assignment gives more opportunities for students to practice writing and discuss the idea at hand.
Despite my disagreement with some of the concepts that Ms. Dobbs suggests in her book, there were also a lot of other good ideas for activities that I could use in my class that I found helpful. In the activities that I learned the most from, I found the method of using the board for the activity was secondary to the actual activity itself. I personally found the order of adjective lesson and sentence structure review lessons very intriguing and hope to use these in my classes one day.