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:
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
