5 KEYS TO CREATING THINKING CLASSROOMS WITH DRY ERASE PAINTED WALLS

Countless educators around the world have come to realize that using individual student desks in the classroom fails to support the idea and practice of collaborative, interactive instruction. For this reason, many schools are now investing in tables as an alternative to desks for student use during the school day. While tables do promote collaboration and can open up new opportunities for learners, they share a common limitation with desks — users have to look down to work on them. When students write and draw at tables, especially during group activities, they tend to crowd over the tables, blocking the teacher’s view of the learning that needs to be observed and monitored.

However, if students work on the large non-permanent vertical surface (NPVS) of a top-quality dry erase wall for problem-solving, brainstorming, and other class-related tasks, their thinking, and learning become visible to the teacher and everyone else in the classroom. Using an NPVS such as a dry erase wall instead of a table or desk doesn’t block understanding but shares it. Of course, it’s important to note that dry erase walls alone won’t be effective in creating a dynamic thinking classroom if they aren’t combined with productive, engaging learning tasks that challenge students to reflect deeply and work collaboratively.

Creating Vibrant Learning Communities with Dry Erase Walls

Having NPVSs such as dry erase walls installed in your classroom can help to develop positive, energized thinking environments and strong learning communities when you use the following techniques:
• Enthusiastically promote continuous student engagement
• Ensure that learning is always visible to both students and teachers
• Encourage easy collaboration among class members
• Give learners who have fallen behind in their lessons the chance to see successful learning strategies being used right before their eyes
• Let students engage in cautious risk-taking activities while learning that may not always succeed, but that will ultimately instill confidence
• Allow for trouble-free teacher observations that lead to more effective instruction and improved classroom management.

As mentioned, using dry erase walls to build a thinking classroom must be combined with vibrant, engaging learning activities in order to achieve successful outcomes for students and enhance their ability to reason and make thoughtful judgments.

Incorporating Dry Erase Walls Elevates the Level of a Thinking Classroom

One issue that many teachers struggle with in designing their classrooms is having sufficient wall space to conduct lessons and also post vital information needed for the teaching process. Teachers often like to use their walls to document the progress of student learning and to post course-related materials such as maps and charts, so the thought of keeping the walls open and bare for brainstorming and other group work isn’t appealing. A great way to get around this obstacle and one that’s less costly than installing traditional whiteboards or interactive whiteboards is to use premium dry erase paint – it’s brilliant!

Applying dry erase paint combined with using the innovative magnetic hanging system GoodHangups is the ideal solution. You can apply the paint to all four walls of your classroom, not just the front wall, and still, be able to write and draw freely while posting students’ work, notes, calendars, maps, and other items with GoodHangups. This system requires no drilling of holes for mounting. Each GoodHangups unit is composed of just a lightweight magnetic sticker and a magnet that can easily be placed alongside or on top of what you already have on your walls.

GoodHangups Can Take a Thinking Classroom to a New Level

You can simply mount the GoodHangups when you need to use them and take them down when you’re done. With these novel gadgets, you can also put up re-sealable plastic bags on your walls to hold low-odor dry erase markers and microfiber cloths for you and your students to use when writing and drawing during class time. Doing so can help save valuable storage space in your desk or supply cabinet.

Many teachers like to use dry erase walls in combination with GoodHangups because it allows them to convert any space into a thinking classroom space. Here students may wrestle with issues by taking multiple viewpoints, come up with informed opinions on a subject, and effectively convey their views to their peers by writing on the walls and using GoodHangups to post annotations and other items related to their work. Creating this type of dynamic, fun, and thoughtful environment for students is one of the most significant challenges teachers face, but teaching and learning in such a setting are both satisfying and enjoyable.

For the sake of variety, another option is to take your lessons into the hallway by also having dry erase paint applied to the hallway walls. In this way, you can use the hall as a supplementary learning space and also share your students’ ideas and images with the entire school community.

PBL Heightens the Impact of Dry Erase Walls in Thinking Classrooms

In order for students to effectively develop their cognitive and critical-analysis skills, they need to feel at ease with the idea of taking risks and sometimes failing in their efforts. The project-based learning (PBL) approach, by which students are able to exercise their mental muscles on genuine real-world problems, offers an optimum way to include the teaching of thinking in day-to-day course content. And what better way to do so than with dry erase walls and GoodHangups as tools for dynamic group interaction?

PBL projects may be easily written down on a dry erase wall for groups of students to examine and discuss in class and then annotate using dry erase markers, along with notes hung by GoodHangups. Through this process, a thoughtful classroom environment imbued with the “language of thinking” is created that’s useful for both students’ academic work and in their future careers. The language of thinking emphasizes reflective learning and distinguishes between reasoning that’s one-dimensional and trivial and reasoning that’s deep, carefully considered, and meaningful.

Teachers’ Questions Should Stretch Students’ Minds

Among the most basic forms of the language of thinking used in classrooms is teacher questioning. Teachers are often urged by administrators and parents to ask higher-level questions that stretch students’ mental limits and thus improve their critical thought processes.

Asking more “how” and “why” types of questions and fewer “when” and “what” types of questions is a key strategy in this approach.
But answering such questions alone has little direct impact on students’ overall ability to think. “How” and “why” questions may bring about some degree of deep thinking for a short time and could help some students develop improved cognitive abilities. However, if students are accustomed to just guessing or making quick judgments about the causes of events, they’ll undoubtedly continue to engage in shallow thinking.

Certain so-called deeper questions, such as “What did you think of that story?” or “Should humans be cloned?” are designed to get students to make personal judgments. And most young people can easily respond to such questions. But without being asked to justify and support their views, students are unlikely to mature intellectually. In a thinking classroom, the teacher’s typical comeback when a student answers a “why” or a “how” question might be “How did you arrive at that answer?” “What are your reasons for thinking that?” or “Have you considered this other option?” Such inquiries by teachers become integral parts of a thoughtful classroom culture and ensure that there is more to answering a meaningful question than a quick offhand response.

Building the classroom learning experience around “how” and “why’ questions is a necessary aspect of promoting deeper levels of thinking in students, but the answers to such questions should always be supplemented with relevant responses, thoughtful assessments, and detailed guidance on how to think about the questions’ meanings and implications.

Dry Erase Wall Paint

Whiteboard Paint Reduces the Need for Electronic Devices

Whiteboard Paint Reduces the Need for Electronic Devices

Of the many environmental benefits of applying ReMarkable dry erase paint, one of the greatest is that it reduces the use of electronic products such as tablets and laptops, which generate an enormous quantity of waste that has devastating effects on Earth’s environment. As the amount of e-waste dramatically increases year by year, solutions for its proper recycling have lagged far behind. Although it is essential to give e-waste items to a certified recycling company that meets strict requirements for handling these materials, many individuals and businesses fail to do so. Their old electronics end up in landfills, producing toxic results for our air, water, and soil. The main hazardous substances to be found in discarded electronic products are lead, mercury, cadmium, zinc, yttrium, chromium, beryllium, nickel, brominated flame retardants, antimony trioxide, halogenated flame retardants, tin, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and phthalates. The presence of these and other toxins in our planet’s ecosystem can be greatly reduced through the use of whiteboard-painted walls in place of electronic devices.

Huge amounts of electronic scrap

poses a great risk both to the environment and to public health. Shortages in raw materials needed to make electronics have brought forth a new industry called “urban mining.”

The start of the 21st century has witnessed the generation of huge amounts of electronic scrap, whose careless recycling in both developed and developing nations poses a great risk both to the environment and to public health. As more people buy electronic gadgets, manufacturers are starting to experience shortages of the raw materials needed to make their products, so reclaiming and reusing the constituents of discarded e-products, called “urban mining,” makes good financial sense. A recent study conducted in China revealed that traditional mining of copper, gold, silver, and aluminum from ore is 13 times more costly than recovering these metals through the urban mining of electronic waste.

E-waste recycling involves taking old electronic devices apart

making it an expensive undertaking. Many companies illegally export e-waste to 3rd world nations where recycling is much cheaper but more destructive to the planet.

Proper or formal e-waste recycling typically involves taking old electronic devices apart, separating and categorizing their contents by material, and then cleaning them. Items are then mechanically shredded for further sorting through the use of advanced separation equipment. Companies that perform this service must adhere to strict health and safety guidelines and use pollution-control technologies that reduce the environmental and public health hazards of handling e-waste. All these procedures make formal recycling an expensive undertaking. As a result, many companies and countries illegally export their e-waste to developing nations where recycling methods are more cost-effective but also much more destructive to the planet.

In the unindustrialized nations where much of this illegal e-waste processing occurs, air pollution levels and concentrations of heavy metals are especially high around so-called “recycling plants,” as compared to other regions. These sites are typically backyard operations where impoverished local residents process the obsolete electronics by hand, separating them into parts to extract valuable metals such as gold, silver, and copper before disposing of the rest in landfills. Some metals and plastics are melted down, and those materials that can’t be feasibly processed accumulate in massive dumps near inhabited places and waterways. Sometimes, toxic fumes are inhaled directly as metals from the parts are burned in open bonfires.

Air-quality in e-scrap yards have highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins known

due to its e-waste industry. Dioxins are a group of chemically related compounds that are considered persistent environmental pollutants (POPs).

A typical site where these crude e-waste recycling methods are used is a cluster of villages in southeastern China known as the world’s largest dumping ground for electronic scrap from the United States. There local villagers remove solder from circuit boards over coal-fired grills, burn plastic casings from wires to extract the copper, silver, and mine gold by soaking computer chips in pools of hydrochloric acid. An air-quality study conducted in the area found that it had some of the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world due to its e-waste industry. Dioxins are a group of chemically related compounds that are considered persistent environmental pollutants (POPs).

Dioxins are found around the globe in local ecosystems, where they accumulate in the food chain, mainly in the fatty tissue of animals. These chemicals are highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental issues, damage the immune system, interfere with the action of hormones, and cause cancer. Due to their potentially lethal nature, prevention or reduction of human exposure is best accomplished through direct measures, such as strict control of e-waste recycling processes to reduce the production of dioxins. Another approach is the application of ReMARKable whiteboard painted walls in schools, offices, and other facilities to reduce the use of electronic devices, which are some of their main sources.

E-waste recycling is detrimental to the health of the workers

Chronic exposure to the pollution emitted from e-waste dumpsites causes high concentrations of heavy metals like lead, copper, zinc, nickel, barium, and chromium to be present in human blood.

For the above-mentioned reasons, the current global recycling system is detrimental to the health of the workers who improperly handle e-waste without protection from dangerous materials and is also a direct cause of contamination in the surrounding environment. Chronic exposure to the atmospheric pollution emitted from e-waste dumpsites causes high concentrations of heavy metals such as lead, copper, zinc, nickel, barium, and chromium to be present in human blood and may be related to hypertension, abnormally low levels of blood oxygen, and other conditions in people working in or living near the sites. The trigger for the air-polluting effect of e-waste is the fact that when the material is heated by overexposure to the sun, for instance, these metals along with other toxic chemicals are released into the atmosphere, causing one of e-waste’s most harmful effects.

Lead is found in almost all Electronic devices

which are becoming obsolete at an astounding rate. When lead is released into the environment near these dumpsites, it can damage the blood, kidneys, and nervous systems of people in the area.

Regarding lead, almost all electronics contain it, and today these devices are growing in number and becoming obsolete at an astounding rate. When discarded, some of our most advanced technological devices represent rapidly expanding and often unregulated exposure to this highly poisonous metal, which plagued even the ancient Romans. A University of Florida environmental scientist recently studied the ecological impact of the lead found in 12 different types of electronic items commonly discarded in landfills. In a report sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he presented his finding that the items leached lead at concentrations above the EPA threshold for categorizing a type of waste as hazardous. When released into the environment near these dumpsites, lead can damage the blood, kidneys, and nervous systems of people in the area.

Arsenic is present in circuit boards, LCD displays, and computer chips

In large doses, arsenic is lethal along with being a known carcinogen, cited to trigger skin cancer, liver cancer, and other forms of the disease.

The air around e-waste dumps is also high in arsenic, various acids, and other potentially toxic chemicals, including mercury and brominated flame retardants. Concerning arsenic, the reckless disposal of e-waste constitutes one of the most common sources of the inorganic form of this poison. Arsenic is present in circuit boards, LCD displays, computer chips, and other electronic components, and as these parts accumulate in landfills, the arsenic present seeps into the surrounding land, affecting its soil chemistry and possibly the contents of groundwater as well. The presence of arsenic in groundwater and soil has varying effects on different organisms and may be harmful to both land and sea animals. In humans, ingesting arsenic in low doses causes irritation of the digestive system, and in large doses, it’s lethal. Arsenic is also a known carcinogen, being cited as a trigger for skin cancer, liver cancer, and other forms of the disease.

Health risks with chemicals from e-waste leaching into soil and groundwater also exist

The potential threat to groundwater quality is of special concern in those states that have yet to enact landfill-ban legislation to control such waste.

Another common method of e-waste disposal is to simply burn the unusable parts after sorting. Introducing arsenic into the atmosphere in this way also has serious implications for human and animal health. For example, research by the National Cancer Institute has shown a linear relationship between inhaling arsenic and the development of lung cancer, as well as a wide range of nervous disorders. Although many states in the US have enacted landfill bans for most consumer electronics and appliances, the dangers associated with the chemicals from e-waste leaching into soil and groundwater remain. The potential threat to groundwater quality is of special concern in those states that have yet to enact landfill-ban legislation to control such waste.

Considering the many harmful environmental consequences related to electronic waste disposal, choosing economical, long-lasting, and eco-friendly ReMARKable Whiteboard Paint is a sensible alternative for all types of applications since it minimizes the need for laptops, tablets, and other devices, providing a highly flexible medium for conveying information and ideas in offices, schools, and other settings.

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