Skip to main content

Clean those boards

A little low-tech ...
I use whiteboards a lot in class - fortunately all of my walls save the windows are covered in whiteboards.  Typically all of my students (~20) are up at the boards for at least part of each class and occasionally for the entire class. For example, today in my MCR3U class I put trig identities to prove on slips of paper and had partners pull one and solve it on the whiteboard, pasting images of the whiteboard solutions in our class OneNote (and then they pulled another question from the pile).
What we need, though, is a way to clean the boards off quickly between questions. Now, we don't have a whole bunch of whiteboard erasers (they are costly, for sure, and plastic -- we don't have our own classrooms so every teacher would have to bring 10-20 erasers around with them) so I have always been looking for alternatives.
Things I've tried:
  1. Old towels.  I would rip them into squares.  They work really well but they went missing all the time. In part, it was other classes taking them but the cleaners would also remove them from the class.  Our school cleaners are excellent and the school prides itself on how things look, so a bunch of ripped rags are not sightly.
  2. Socks. I bought a 40-sock pack of kids athletic (short) socks and they were great! But, same problem! The cleaners would find a "dirty" sock and throw it out (which, I guess, you'd want them to do).
  3. Plastic bags.  This was a surprise -- I had no erasers of any kind left so when we were working I just grabbed a Walgreens bag I had used to bring in some cookies and sure enough, it cleaned off the board! These are nicely compressible and it was nice to be able to re-used them for something.
In any case, I'm still on the hunt for something that will work better.  Even the erasers break down - but they break down into plastic particles and I'm not sure that's the best.  
Labels:

Comments

Tina said…
I’ve also got the same problem. I use Lysol Wipes! One bucket lasts quite a long time as well you can or pre-cut them in half. They are very cost effective and kids often ask to clean the boards for me. One possible problem is that if a colleague is scent sensitive, it may affect the environment.
February 6, 2020 at 6:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's...
19 comments
Read more

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou...
40 comments
Read more

Making your own font

Slid in amongst all the announcements for Ignite, Microsoft's big conference in September, as a tool that I thought was quite cool.  Not original, since similar things have existed elsewhere & when, but a nice option nevertheless. Microsoft's Font Maker allows you to create your own font using digital ink.  You get all 26 characters, numbers and punctuation (for English languages) on which you draw your font for each character. (For me, it's the first 128 printable characters out of the ASCII table!)  Using your #digitalink pen, you draw out what you want each character to look like. I just quickly wrote out the alphabet as you can see below: You don't have to do it all at once and you can keep working on your Font as you go; it saves as a JSON Project File which means you can send these between collaborators. Once you have your font done, you can adjust the spacing between characters & words to make it look good (it uses a scene from Hamlet -- I...
Post a Comment
Read more