My Favorite: Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces (#VNPS) aka - Whiteboards!

Two things have drastically changed my classroom this semester: 1) VNPS and 2) Spiraling my homework.

There has been a lot of discussion in the past year about the research behind whiteboards and how to implement them in the classroom (a la Alex Overwijk). I hope this post can highlight some of the nitty-gritty "how can I do this?" to make your implementation go smoother.

First, should you do this? Yes!!! You wouldn't believe what a change it will make. Some reasons to do it:
1) I teach on block so I have kids for 90 minutes/day. You'd be surprised how long they will work at the boards (I'm talk 40+ minutes on task in a normally rowdy class).
2) The kids BEG to do whiteboards and get excited to do math on them (Yeah, you need to see it to believe it)
3) It gets them up out of your seat.
4) You can immediately identify who needs help or if the whole class needs to pause and receive a mini-lesson on something they are all missing.
5) Use random grouping to get students working with others they don't normally work with
6) It dramatically increases student talk.

Here are my #VNPS hacks:

1) Buy 4'x8' white tile board and get it cut in thirds at the store. Should be pretty heavy - not flimsy. Ran about $14/board for me and I got 5. I only had room for 14 pieces though.

2) Decide how to attach. My walls are really annoying and have been painted over with the wrong type of paint, so I had issues with falling boards at first - fun stuff. See if your school will let you drill into the wall to attach. But I like to fly under the radar so here is my method:

3 strips of velcro command strips along the top of the board and two command hooks on the bottom to support the weight from below. Bonus tip: AC Moore has a slew of them, use a 40-50% off coupon to save some $$$.

4) I had students taking push pins off my posters to put up the problems they were working on which annoyed me to no end. Solution: Duct tape a binder clip to the top of the whiteboards that can hold whatever the prompt or problem is they are working on.

5) Doubles as a holder for Expo Marker!

6) Cut pieces of felt and add a book ring to the end. Superglue a hook to the board to hand it on. Now kids have the supplies they need at the boards already.

7) Add numbers to the boards. Then if you use a random generator for groups like the one at My Instant Classroom they go straight to the board number that is generated.

I hope that some of these hacks will help you! This is a great and relatively inexpensive (<$200) change to make in your classroom that will radically change the level of talk, communication and quality of work you see just by getting them up out of their seats and at the boards. What are you waiting for? =). 

PS - 

Cleaning: Just use water. When you need to get a more thorough clean use Totally Awesome from the Dollar Tree BUTTTT....rinse the board off with water after using it so the expo's don't stick to the residue. #liveandlearn.