In the STEAM education model, utilizing digital tools helps enhance the efficiency of communication between teachers and students. The development of STEAM education emphasizes not only imparting and learning disciplinary knowledge but also enhancing learning communication efficiency between teachers and students through digital tools. The widespread application of digital tools has brought unprecedented convenience and possibilities to education, making teaching more interactive, flexible, and personalized.
What is STEAM Education?
The concept of STEAM education was initially proposed by the U.S. government as an educational initiative to strengthen science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education in K-12 education in the United States. STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, encouraging children’s development and improvement in these areas to enhance their overall competence and global competitiveness.
The core of STEAM education is using science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics as entry points to guide students in exploration, dialogue, and critical thinking, guiding students to think and explore rather than traditional rote learning. In STEAM education, students typically have access to mobile devices, such as laptops, and utilize high-quality software and apps under conscious teaching and guidance from teachers to apply their practical abilities.
In STEAM learning, teachers first guide students to pose their own questions. Then, they lead students to form better groups, allocate tasks, and establish their own group plan processes. They then start collecting information as a team, sharing information, deriving answers, and encourage students to present their results to everyone. In this process, online collaboration tools within teams are indispensable. Among these, the digital whiteboard is crucial in STEAM education. Below are the significant functions and usage techniques of the digital whiteboard in STEAM learning.
Roles of Digital Whiteboard in STEAM Courses
Conducting Virtual STEAM Classrooms
In the 21st century, the exchange and access to various resources have gradually overcome traditional distance limitations, especially in educational resources. In an online classroom, students from anywhere in the world can collaborate in a virtual classroom over the internet to complete group assignments, reflecting a future trend in education.
Efficient Group Communication and Collaboration
STEAM courses often adopt project-based learning (PBL) forms, making communication within groups critical. Through the BoardMix online collaborative whiteboard, members of the same learning group can engage in efficient, synchronized communication, sharing the latest ideas and creativity in real-time, swiftly completing classroom tasks in a team co-creation format.
In this process, Brainstorming and Mind Map templates in the Armer Whiteboard can assist students in organizing thoughts and notes efficiently. Additionally, the information sharing in group mode allows seamless communication between group members and teachers, greatly enhancing the efficiency of STEAM classrooms!
Visualizing Creative Ideas
Digital whiteboards are highly portable, operational, and have rich visualization capabilities, transforming dull knowledge into visual images, mind maps, sticky notes, sounds, and rich visuals, enabling proactive learning driven by curiosity.
Armer Whiteboard provides extensive modular capabilities. On its infinite canvas, you can easily create multimedia mind maps by freely arranging images, documents, videos, screenshots, and more on the content clipboard, making it straightforward and clear to articulate viewpoints. Through diverse and visualized content presentation, you can quickly visualize ideas in your mind, making problem communication and resolution more accessible.
Supporting Interdisciplinary Teaching
Digital whiteboards can present complex science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics concepts through graphics, charts, models, etc. Teachers can use whiteboards to draw diagrams, flowcharts, physical models, etc., helping students understand abstract concepts and relationships intuitively.
Digital whiteboards help teachers integrate knowledge and concepts from various disciplines such as science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Breaking down barriers between disciplines, teachers can demonstrate complex concepts and related theories on the whiteboard, promoting students’ understanding and comprehensive application of the relationships between different subjects. This fosters creative thinking and problem-solving skills in students, driving educational innovation and development.
Promoting Creative Thinking and Problem-Solving
Digital whiteboards provide an infinite creative space where students can freely express and showcase their ideas, viewpoints, and creativity. Through drawing, writing, annotation, etc., students can concretize abstract thoughts, nurturing their expressive abilities and logical thinking.
Using digital whiteboards provides students with an inspirational and challenging learning environment, sparking their creative thinking and problem-solving skills. Students can freely express and showcase their ideas, designs, and solutions on the whiteboard, presenting creativity through drawing and graphic design, fostering artistic and engineering thinking.
How to Use Digital Whiteboards in Steam Education
Utilizing Mind Maps for Better Knowledge Organization
Meredith Williams, an 8th-grade science teacher in Orlando, Florida, aims to enhance students’ understanding of concepts related to the formation of landscapes through weathering, erosion, and deposition. She uses terrain kits and landscape images (for comparison with 3D models), along with her own developed schedule, to engage students in group discussions and analyses within 45 minutes. In just 25 minutes, students grasp the concepts and internalize knowledge by presenting to the entire class. This process integrates Steam solutions into her science teaching.
To encourage her students to think critically and creatively through scientific exploration, Williams incorporates various 3D printing tools, allowing students to observe, analyze, and form ideas hands-on.
The use of mind map templates in digital whiteboards benefits teachers in creating lesson plans and serves as an important tool for students to organize critical questions. In Steam courses, teachers guide students to form groups, identify problems, gather data, and present their research results to the class. Leveraging mind map templates within tools like BoardMix facilitates design prototyping and communication sharing in project-based learning.
Conducting Brainstorming Discussions with Digital Whiteboards
A crucial aspect of Steam education is encouraging students to unleash creativity through brainstorming sessions. Brainstorming allows students to freely discuss and explore interdisciplinary creativity. Digital whiteboards play a pivotal role in recording and sharing ideas during this process.
Brainstorming helps teachers plan concepts, skills, and topics for instruction. Under each topic, a teacher lists as many ideas and questions as possible for exploring the concept. Utilizing the brainstorming module on digital whiteboards, teachers collaborate with the class to involve them in the planning process, encouraging students to gather and apply interdisciplinary knowledge. Similar and overlapping ideas are grouped, and decisions are made on how to integrate them into a unit/course.
Leveraging Mind Map Templates on Digital Whiteboards
In Steam education, mind map templates on digital whiteboards are powerful tools for teachers to design lesson plans and for students to organize critical questions. These templates assist teachers in clearly outlining course content and learning objectives, organizing various topics and concepts into structured charts for effective teaching and learning.
Teachers can use mind map templates to plan teaching content, presenting course structure and learning paths from an overall to detailed perspective. Key concepts, tasks, and activities within the curriculum can be logically sequenced to ensure clarity and order in the teaching process. Through the online collaboration feature of digital whiteboards, teachers can share and receive feedback on lesson plans, promoting resource sharing and collaboration.
Students can utilize mind map templates to organize class notes and key learning points, aiding in clarifying thoughts and retaining knowledge. In project-based learning, students can use mind map templates to organize main steps, tasks, and key questions, fostering teamwork and project management.
In conclusion
the integration of digital whiteboards into STEAM education significantly enhances communication efficiency between teachers and students, fostering a dynamic and interactive learning environment. These tools empower educators to design engaging lesson plans, facilitating the organization of complex concepts and encouraging students to explore and collaborate effectively.
As STEAM education continues to evolve, leveraging digital tools like whiteboards enables personalized and interactive learning experiences, nurturing critical thinking, creativity, and interdisciplinary connections among students. The widespread adoption of digital technologies in education opens up new avenues for innovative teaching methods, making learning more accessible, flexible, and engaging for students worldwide. By embracing these advancements, educators can further empower students to thrive in the digital age and beyond.
