SIX NOVEL APPROACHES TO USING YOUR CLASSROOM DRY ERASE WALL

If you’re a teacher who has a premium dry erase painted wall in your classroom, you’ve undoubtedly been in front of it many times taking notes during a problem-based learning (PBL) session, drawing a diagram to supplement a verbal explanation, or simply listing the main points presented in a lesson. In such cases, your dry erase wall serves as an invaluable tool for recording and communicating ideas and images to your students in a large, easy-to-see format.

Regrettably, however, the ways in which dry erase walls are used in the classroom are often not especially original or creative. Generating mind maps, writing lists and outlines, and making drawings and graphs are the go-to dry erase wall activities for most teachers and students during the typical school day. However, it’s possible to use this classroom staple in much more imaginative and unusual ways to enhance the process of teaching and learning. Here are six novel dry erase wall strategies for your consideration that can add variety to your standard set of teaching techniques and hopefully increase your students’ excitement and engagement in learning.

1. Switching Note-taking Roles can Re-energize a Group Brainstorming Session

Instead of giving all of the responsibility to yourself or the designated note-taker during classroom brainstorming sessions, why not try exchanging roles throughout the class period? Having students hand over their dry erase marker to a fellow student can be an effortless way to liven up the course of a brainstorming activity and introduce new perspectives to a mind map or a starburst diagram being created on your dry erase wall. This technique also teaches students to adjust and get used to other people’s learning processes, thus improving their skills at partnership building and teamwork.

2. Turning the Tables Offers Students a Chance to Collaborate More Powerfully

As an alternative to continuously turning your back to students when writing information on your dry erase wall in class, it’s more productive to “turn the tables” and engage everyone in the teaching and learning process. Premium dry erase paint can transform any smooth flat surface in your classroom, such as a table, your desk, or students’ desks, into a blank canvas for writing and drawing.

When a number of dry erase painted surfaces are available throughout the room, your students can gather around to collaborate and become part of the teaching and note-taking process by writing down their ideas, adding comments, and discussing lesson material as a group. In this way, student-to-student relationships will be fostered, and brainstorming sessions will become more dynamic, engaging, and interactive, leading to productive teaching outcomes in any subject from math to language arts to history.

3. Make Note-taking a More Inclusive Experience for Students with Post-its

When acting as a note-taker during a brainstorming session, it can be exhausting and frustrating for a teacher to have to deal with the steady flood of ideas and questions coming from eager students. However, by combining a mind map that’s generated on your dry erase wall with personally written and edited post-it notes from the whole class, the activity of note-taking can become more wide-ranging and democratic, as all of the students have a chance to express their ideas and participate on an equal basis. In addition, by using this approach, everyone in the class gets the opportunity to be part of the note-taking activity while you still function as the central note-taker to guide the process along.

This technique works well to enhance student understanding, as it may often be challenging for a class to assimilate and respond to all the ideas being recorded on a complex, multi-tiered mind map. But using multi-colored post-it notes allows for students to add their own color-coded ideas to the wall and thus more quickly orient themselves to the complex thought processes and layers involved in a large mind map.

4. Turn the Use of Your Dry Erase Wall into a Digital Experience

Technology has always had a great deal to offer for the field of education, and these days many teachers are embracing electronic whiteboards in place of traditional framed whiteboards as go-to classroom teaching tools. However, not every facility or school system has the kind of budget that can handle purchasing expensive high-tech equipment such as interactive whiteboards. Also, electronic whiteboards can be hard to operate for teachers who lack strong technology skills or have not been trained in how to use these devices. Another problem is that in some classroom situations, it may be difficult for students to see and use interactive whiteboards effectively due to glare and other factors.
But a unique and less complicated way to digitize the whiteboard experience for your students is available for little cost, namely, the use of a dry erase painted wall in conjunction with a video projector as an instructional tool.

By using your video projector to project images onto your dry erase wall instead of a conventional projector screen, you can construct an exciting interactive learning environment in the classroom where visuals become supplements to your regular note-taking activities. In this way, your verbal explanations during lessons will become clearer and more engaging, and a new dimension will be added to your daily presentations that students are sure to appreciate and enjoy.

Focusing the class projector on the part of the dry erase wall you’re using to present lesson material will provide you with plenty of opportunity to create mixed media presentations and teach complex ideas in various subject areas through a blend of notes, videos, and even statistical data when appropriate. The low-gloss sheen of premium Dry Erase Painted walls allows them to serve as excellent projection screens, so that clear visibility is always ensured for your students during lessons.

5. Spelling Bees and other Games for Younger Students Provide Variety

Dry erase walls are ideal to use with younger students with whom you can hold games and contests such as spelling bees and scrabble. Students are more likely to retain information like the proper spelling of English words when they write them down by hand, especially on a vertical surface such as a dry erase painted wall. Writing and drawing on vertical surfaces has been shown to enhance students’ learning ability and psychomotor development in a number of ways.

To hold a spelling bee, divide your class into groups of three or four, call out words that you’re currently studying, and allow the students to take turns spelling out the words on your dry erase wall. Turn the activity into a friendly competition by offering the winning group bonus points or a small reward for their efforts.

6. Capturing the Contents of a Day’s Lesson is a Great Way to Preserve Notes

While leaving at the end of the day or at lunchtime, many students use their phones to take pictures of the classroom dry erase wall as a reminder of the topics discussed or to provide them with notes when studying for tests. In such cases, readability can be an issue, but as always, there are apps to address this problem. Multiple scanning apps are now on the market that can turn your students’ dry erase wall photos into easy-to-read PDF files to make life a lot easier and more organized for everyone.

These are just a few ways to use whiteboards in the classroom. Not only are whiteboards a great way to engage students, but they’re cost-effective and better for the environment.

Capture it
Students often leave the classroom taking pictures of the whiteboard as a reminder of the discussed topics during readings or for an overview when studying for the exam. Readability is an issue, though. But, as always, there is an app for that! There are now multiple scanning apps available that will turn your whiteboard pictures into easy-to-read PDFs that will make life a bit more organized.

DRY ERASE PAINTED WONDER WALLS FOR INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING

Inquiry-based learning is a student-centered instructional strategy that focuses on having students pose and examine questions to gain new knowledge. Occasionally, inquiry-based learning may involve a teacher presenting a problem or scenario for students to explore and address. In all approaches to inquiry-based learning, student questioning and research are at the core of the educational process and dry erase painted walls (aka “wonder walls”) can strengthen that core.

Student inquiries, thoughts, and analyses are emphasized and promoted, with a focus on students’ views about a specific question or issue. This approach is especially effective for creating initial student engagement and then guiding students to go beyond fundamental knowledge to a deeper awareness of critical thinking, evidence-based reasoning, and inventive problem-solving. In inquiry-based learning, students may complete case studies, group projects, or individual research projects, among other tasks. Making in-depth links with the content studied helps students develop skills that will be highly valuable in their future academic lives and worldly careers.

In inquiry-based learning, students come up with questions on their own, seek answers to the questions through research, share their answers and the knowledge they gained, and then reflect on the learning process they experienced. Instead of the teacher always choosing the topic or questions related to a study unit, the students have the freedom to select the questions on the topic they wish to investigate, then pursue their research and present their findings.

Although several types of inquiry-based learning exist, they all have the same outcome. Students make use of open-ended questions to guide their own learning in line with their personal interests; make appropriate connections among details; and thus deepen and broaden their knowledge base and research skills. This approach to education relates to an aphorism by Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.” Inquiry-based learning allows students to genuinely understand the content they study and to increase their wisdom in the process.

What Are the Advantages of Practicing Inquiry-Based Learning on Dry Erase Painted Wonder walls?

The inquiry-based approach to learning arouses students’ curiosity and provides opportunities for collaboration, which in turn increases their engagement and excitement about education. When students feel they have ownership of the learning process, their interest level rises, resulting in a deeper grasp of academic content.

Instead of traditional pedagogy, which is often dominated by teacher talk, teacher questions, memorization, and recall by students, inquiry-based learning supports students in planning and implementing their own educational process. Teachers thus become facilitators, not dictators of instruction. For students of all ages, increased motivation and a genuine love of learning are the outcomes of this method.

Inquiry-based learning is also a great way to provide genuine differentiation; that is, adjusting the pace, level, or type of instruction in response to individual learners’ needs, styles, or personal interests. The inquiry-based approach also helps to build self-reliance and independence and nurtures students’ preferences and pastimes. In addition, recent research shows that inquiry-based learning boosts student achievement levels and evens out the playing field in schools with children of diverse socio-economic backgrounds and cultures. When students are surveyed, they typically say they prefer inquiry-based learning over traditional teaching methods.

The Dry Erase Painted “Wonder Wall”: A Powerful Inquiry-Based Learning Technique

One highly effective strategy for practicing inquiry-based learning is to create a “wonder wall” on your dry erase wall, where students can write “I wonder” types of questions about specific topics with dry erase markers. Here you can also post artifacts to stimulate further questions. Post-it notes can be added to the wonder wall if students come up with additional questions and ideas in class or when they’re outside of the classroom and need a handy way to record their thoughts.

After it’s populated with a sufficient number of artifacts and questions, the wonder wall can become a resource for determining the next topic of study for the class. When generating a wonder wall, teachers should emphasize that all student questions are valid. They should also encourage questions that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” response but instead lead to in-depth research by students.

Creating a wonder wall is a great strategy to use in inquiry-based learning, as it builds a space where students can do the following:
· Get themselves thinking on topics they want to learn about
· Share their learning experiences throughout the inquiry process
· Keep their ideas and questions visible to others
· Interact meaningfully with their peers on topics of interest
· Discuss learning goals, measures, and evaluation criteria
· Share the evidence and outcomes of their learning process.

Dry erase painted wonder walls are meant to be built at the onset of a unit and should be kept active throughout the unit as they are living representations of students’ learning. Begin building the wall when you first invoke students to start thinking about the topic the class will be studying. Students will examine the artifacts you post on the wall and ask questions about what they’re seeing. This sets the students’ prior knowledge in motion and prompts them to share their ideas with their peers in a knowledge-building cycle.

Artifacts can be Hung on Your Wall with GoodHangups

The artifacts used to trigger student conversations and interest in a topic may include the following:
· physical objects
· photos
· drawings
· copies of internet articles
· videos
· fictional stories

Many teachers like to use pictures printed in color, especially if they don’t have access to real-life objects related to the topic for the unit being covered. Lightweight items such as photos, drawings, and printouts of articles may be posted by using GoodHangups, an innovative new hanging system consisting of a magnetized sticker and a magnet that can be mounted on your dry erase wall without damaging the surface.

The Role of Student Questions is Key to Constructing Your Wonder Wall

The use of a wonder wall at the start of an inquiry unit stimulates students to think about a topic by allowing them to ask questions and providing them with artifacts. The next step is to have the class ask more questions. As mentioned, they can use sticky notes to write down questions about what they see on the wonder wall. Use these notes to help students keep track of what the class is thinking about.

As students continue to share their prior knowledge and questions, the wonder wall is gradually constructed. These questions are the driving force behind the inquiry-based learning process. Arrange the questions according to themes and then use them to come up with goals for learning and criteria for success.

At some point, you’re likely to find gaps in the students’ knowledge that will need to be filled through teacher-directed lessons. Post the questions next to the artifacts on the wonder wall, and throughout the learning process, answer the questions and keep track of those that remain unanswered. It’s through your students’ questions that inquiry-based learning and the wonder wall are developed.

Avoid Answering Questions during the Inquiry Process

While using your wonder wall, if students ask questions, it’s important to avoid giving answers and instead have the students add the questions to the wonder wall and then find the answers by themselves. Leading students through lessons to ultimately give them the answers is not what inquiry-based learning and wonder walls are about. With a wonder wall, students need to work to find information and shouldn’t expect to have an easy way out.

Later on in the unit, you may have discussions about certain topics, and you’ll have to explain various concepts. But you should do this together as a class. In this way, instead of teaching your students, you’re facilitating their learning by providing the tools to find answers on their own.

Through the use of wonder walls, teachers and students enjoy the freedom to build a learning environment that meets the needs of all class members. Thus, inquiry-based learning becomes an effective means to create a place where learners enjoy finding the answers to questions and sharing their knowledge with their peers.

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QUALITY WHITEBOARD PAINT REDUCES THE NEED FOR POLLUTING PAPER

One of the most significant environmental benefits of implementing the use of non-epoxy whiteboard painted walls is the fact that they help to reduce the use of paper in business, education, and other fields. The amount of paper being produced worldwide is increasing and recently exceeded 400 million tons per year. The manufacture and use of paper have a profoundly negative ecological impact that can be summarized as follows.

Forest Destruction

Over the past four decades, global paper consumption has risen by 400%, and the wood used to produce it often comes from illegal sources or from poorly managed or even virgin forests, so the effect of paper use on the world’s woodlands is devastating. Globally, deforestation has become a major problem in both developed and developing countries, and pulp and paper manufacturing play a significant role in this crisis, with approximately 14% of the annual wood harvest being used to produce paper. This amounts to the destruction of around 4.1 million hectares of forest each year to satisfy the world’s desire for paper – an area the size of the Netherlands every 365 days.

This devastation of our planet’s precious trees to make pulp and paper creates both temporary and long-term environmental disturbances in the world’s forest habitats. The majority of Earth’s biodiversity (its vast array of insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, plants, and trees) lives in and depends on forest environments. This is where life forms have largely evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and deforestation can decimate vast sections of this incredible biological richness in a matter of minutes.

Energy Use

Pulp and paper production requires vast amounts of energy. In fact, the pulp and paper industry is the fifth-largest global consumer of energy, accounting for approximately six percent of total use. To make paper takes twice the energy required to make plastic bags, and though they share of total power utilized by the pulp/paper industry has declined since 2000, the sector continues to be among the top commercial consumers of energy, much of which comes from coal-fired generators that are highly polluting contributors to global warming.

According to the Canadian government agency Statistics Canada, in 2014, the pulp and paper industry accounted for 24% of the total energy consumed by all manufacturing operations in the country. So, with such a high, continuous demand for heat as well as power, many pulp and paper producers are adopting energy-saving systems such as heat recovery and cogeneration, or the generation of electricity and another form of energy like heat at the same time. Although these efforts are made with the good intention of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution, a much more straightforward and more economical alternative approach is implementing the use of ReMARKable whiteboard painted walls to avoid using paper products flip charts, and paper handouts altogether.

Water Use

Pulp and paper manufacturing uses more water to generate a volume of products than any other industry in the world; in the US alone, it’s among the largest users of water in the entire industrial economy. On average, 54 m3 of water is needed to make one metric ton of pulp or paper, and almost all stages of production involve water. Specifically, water is used:
To transport the ingredients of paper in paper machines.
To cook wood chips to produce pulp.
As a medium for heat transfer.
To wash the wood to make the pulp.
To wash the pulp itself.
To wash the pulp-handling machines.
To bleach the pulp, the most water-intensive part of the process.
All of this water usage during each stage of papermaking means that it takes more than three gallons of water to make a single 8 ½” x 11” sheet of paper. Thus, a 500-page notebook requires approximately 1,500 gallons of water to manufacture. Moreover, pulp and paper mills create large amounts of wastewater and sludge, causing severe environmental challenges with regard to treatment and disposal.

Contributions to Global Warming and Climate Change

Pulp and paper manufacturing generates nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and carbon dioxide, among other environmentally damaging compounds. Nitrogen and sulfur dioxides are key contributors to acid rain, while carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas intensifying the effects of climate change. Also, when paper is disposed of in dumpsites, it eventually breaks down, producing methane, a potent polluter with a global warming potential (GWP) approximately 28–36 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. In other words, the gas is 28-36 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, making it one of the most damaging of all greenhouse gases. And, as mentioned, the pulp/paper industry consumes vast amounts of energy from coal-fired generators that also add significantly to global warming and climate change.

Pollution

The pulp and paper industry is the third-largest commercial polluter of our planet’s air, water, and soil. Large quantities of extremely toxic chemical contaminants such as hydrogen sulfide, chlorine, chlorine dioxide, and sulfur dioxide are used to make pulp and paper. These chemicals, known as hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), eventually end up in waste-water streams, soil, and agricultural crops so that people who work in or live near paper mills often suffer from health problems such as obstructed airways, hypersensitivity conditions, and cardiovascular disease. The pulp-making process alone involves a complex series of chemical reactions that produce numerous hazardous HAPs. For this reason, pulp mills in the United States are required to maintain pollution control systems. However, these systems may not always function as intended, so actual emissions exceed legally established limits.

Also, the disposal of paper in landfills and the subsequent production of the potent greenhouse gas methane through decomposition add greatly to the polluting effects of paper products. As mentioned, methane gas is 28–36 times more toxic to the atmosphere than CO2. And even if paper is not recklessly disposed of in landfills and is recycled instead, the de-inking procedure used during paper recycling is also a source of pollution in the form of chemicals released in the effluent.

Waste Production

Paper generates two main types of waste: that derived from its manufacture and that coming from its disposal after use. The solid wastes that come from paper making include sludge generated from wastewater treatment.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), approximately 27% (or 67 million tons) of the solid municipal waste that enters landfills, and 50% of the waste generated by businesses consists of discarded paper and paperboard. Moreover, paper waste, like many other forms of trash, poses the additional environmental hazard of toxic inks, dyes, and polymers that can potentially be carcinogenic when incinerated or commingled with groundwater through traditional disposal methods such as landfills.

A decline in the use of paper was predicted at the beginning of the electronic revolution, but unfortunately, the decrease failed to materialize. Instead, the global demand for paper is expected to double before the year 2030, and a large proportion of this paper will end up in landfills. In 2012, for example, the US threw out over 24,000,000 tons of paper, which, as mentioned, is a high water- and energy-intensive material to make. If that paper had been recycled, each pound, the amount found in a typical daily newspaper, would have saved 3.5 gallons of water, totaling 168,000,000,000 gallons of water saved.

But paper recycling can mitigate the impact of paper waste only so much and doesn’t diminish the ecological and economic effects of the energy consumed in making, transporting, and burying, and/or reprocessing paper. By contrast, implementing the use of ReMARKable whiteboard painted walls to replace paper products in offices and classrooms totally negates the many dangers and costs associated with their use and helps to ensure a sustainable planetary ecosystem for ourselves and for future generations.

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DRY ERASE WALL QUOTES FOR FEBRUARY 2022

Dry Erase Wall Quotes for February: A Month of Hope and Anticipation

February is said to be the month of love, although it also suggests a hint of winter’s end and hope for the coming spring. Whatever way you think of it, the second month of the year is the coldest in the Northern Hemisphere and stands as a link between the frigid days of winter and the balmy days of springtime. The following is a collection of dry erase wall quotes that reflect a wide range of thoughts and feelings about February and about looking forward to warmer weather.

Although February may be a harsh time of year, you can still find happiness, continue to grow as a person, and live with purpose during the coldest of months. With this idea in mind, after reading the quotes, find those that you find inspiring, thought-provoking, or amusing, and periodically post them in a prominent spot on your dry erase wall. You can even decorate the passages with original artwork or doodles and memorize those you like the best.

Reflections on February

1. “February is short and very sweet.”
– Charmaine J. Forde (US writer)

2. “In February, there is everything to hope for and nothing to regret.”
– Patience Strong (English poet)

3. “February makes a bridge, and March breaks it.”
– Georges Hebert (French inventor, filmmaker, and physical educator)

4. “If January is the month of change, February is the month of lasting change. January is for dreamers. February is for doers.”
– Marc Parent (French-Canadian business executive, mechanical engineer, and philanthropist)

5. “Even though February was the shortest month of the year, sometimes it seemed like the longest.”
– Lauraine Snelling (US writer)

6. “February is the border between winter and spring.”
– Terri Guillemets (US writer)

7. “There is always in February some one day, at least, when one smells the yet distant, but surely coming summer.”
– Gertrude Jekyll (British horticulturist, photographer, and writer)

8. “While it is February, one can taste the full joys of anticipation. Spring stands at the gate with her finger on the latch.”
– Patience Strong (English poet)

9. “February, when the days of winter seem endless, and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.”
– Shirley Jackson (US writer)

10. “Even winter, the hardest season, dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away.”
– Clive Barker (English playwright, film director, and author)

11. “One of the dangers of being alone in February is the tendency to dwell on past relationships. Whether you’re daydreaming about that ‘one that got away,’ or recalling the fairytale date you went on last Valentine’s Day, romanticizing the past isn’t helpful.”
– Amy Morin (US psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and bestselling author)

Mother Nature in February

12. “Today is the first of February, snowy, brilliant, but dripping with the sound of spring wherever the sun lies warm, and calling with the heart of spring yonder where the crows are assembling. There is spring in the talk of the chickadees outside my window and in the cheerful bluster of a red squirrel in the hickory.”
– Dallas Lore Sharp (US author and university professor)

13. “An adventurous swallow too early flying from the south, a vision of snowdrops in the snow, a day of April warmth lit by a slant February sun, are all hailed with pleasure as harbingers of a more gracious season on its way.”
– Oscar Fay Adams (US editor and author)

14. “On the wind in February, snowflakes float still. Half inclined to turn to rain, nipping, dripping, chill.”
– Christina Georgina Rossetti (English writer of romantic, devotional, and children’s poems)

15. “February brings the rain, thaws the frozen lake again.”
– Sara Coleridge (English author of instructive verses for children)

16. “February, a form pale-vestured, wildly fair, one of the North Wind’s daughters with icicles in her hair.”
– Edgar Fawcett (US novelist and poet)

17. “February, bending from Heaven. In azure mirth, it kissed the forehead of the Earth and smiled upon the silent sea, and bade the frozen streams be free, and waked to music all their fountains, and breathed upon the frozen mountains.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley (English Romantic poet and social critic)

18. “A small bird twitters on a leafless spray, across the snow waste breaks a gleam of gold. What token can I give my friend today but February blossoms, pure and cold? Frail gifts from Nature’s hand, I see the signs of spring about the land. These chill snowdrops, fresh from wintry bowers, are the forerunners of a world of flowers.”
– Sarah Doudney (English fiction writer and poet)

19. “Fair maid of February, drop of snow, enchanted to a flower, and there within. A dream of April green who without sin was conceived, but how no man may know.”
– Fraser’s Magazine (19th-century English general and literary journal)

20. “The bitter winds in February were sometimes called the First East Winds, but the longing for spring somehow made them seem more piercing.”
– Eiji Yoshikawa (Japanese historical novelist)

21. “Late February days; and now, at last, might you have thought that winter’s woe was past. So fair the sky was, and so soft the air.”
– William Morris (British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, printer, translator, and socialist activist)

Amusing Views on February

22. “February is the shortest month, so if you’re having a miserable month, try to schedule it for February.”
– Lemony Snicket (pen name of Daniel Handler, US writer and musician)

23. “The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.”
– Tom Robbins (US novelist)

24. “Cold and snowy February does seem slow and trying, very. Still, a month made gay by Cupid never could be wholly stupid.”
– Louise Bennett Weaver (US writer)

25. “Do not rely on February. The sun in this month begets a headache like an angel slapping you in the face.”
– Anne Sexton (US poet)

26. “February is for curmudgeons, whinge bags, and misanthropes. You can’t begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it’s so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it’s so great.”
– Lionel Shriver (US author and journalist)

27. “I used to try to decide which was the worst month of the year. In the winter I would choose February. The reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it, they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.”
– Katherine Paterson (Chinese-born US writer of children’s novels)

28. “Can’t wait until February 15th – the chocolate will be on sale. Oh, bargains, my first love!”
– Anonymous

29. “Groundhog found fog. New snows and blue toes. Fine and dandy for Valentine candy. Snow spitting. If you’re not mitten-smitten, you’ll be frostbitten. By jingy feels springy.”
– The Old Farmer’s Almanac (US reference book)

30. “February is merely as long as is needed to pass the time until March.”
– J. R. Stockton (US writer)

31. “The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February. Spring is too far away to comfort even by anticipation, and winter long ago lost the charm of novelty. This is the very three a.m. of the calendar.”
– Joseph Wood Krutch (US author, critic, and naturalist)

32. “February is the most wonderful month of the year; you work for 28 days and get paid for 30.”
– Anonymous

33. “When God was making the months, I think February was a mistake, like a burp. There it was, small, dark, and prickly. It had absolutely no redeeming qualities.”
– Shannon Wiersbitzky (US writer)

34. “February days are a marketing gimmick; love happens every day.”
– Randeep Hooda (Indian actor and equestrian)

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HOW TO MARKET YOUR PAINTING BUSINESS IN THE COVID-19 ENVIRONMENT

Marketing Your Painting Business in the COVID-19 Environment

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has caused major transformations in businesses and industries around the world. The need to adapt to the changing times has affected virtually every sector of the global economy. In the case of commercial and residential painting contractors, the current environment offers many new and unforeseen opportunities to enhance company growth, brand recognition, and profits despite the hurdles faced in dealing with a slower economy, social distancing, the need to wear protective masks, and other issues. The following information is designed to help commercial and residential painting contractors market their businesses, preserve or improve their profit margins, and represent their companies as safe, reliable options for businesses, organizations, and private individuals to hire in the current COVID-19 environment.

Build strong brand awareness of your company among consumers

Develop a brand that leaves an indelible impression in the minds of potential customers. In doing so, make certain that your brand clearly reflects your personal values and shows consumers your company’s most winning attributes, such as a strong emphasis on following health and safety regulations in the current global environment. Creating a clearly defined character for your business through well-thought-out brand development will allow your clients to connect and engage with you and your staff and gain a sense of loyalty to your brand. The more consumers become conscious of your brand, the better they will understand your pricing structure, the quality of your work, your emphasis on health and safety, and the personal values that provide the foundation of your operation. In the process, they’ll feel more attracted to your brand and become eager to do business with you.

The level of loyalty shown by customers grows with a brand’s increasing age. So, if your company is relatively new to the market, you’ll need to persuade consumers that your business has much more to offer than your competitors in terms of quality of service, reliability, competitive pricing, and other factors that relate to your specific market demographic. And even if your business has been around for a while, your company will reap abundant rewards if you work to build up consumer recognition of your existing brand.

Instead of just being a logo, a color scheme, or a cover photo on Facebook, a brand represents the way you make your clients feel about your business, and it is developed by using a uniform approach in all the contacts customers make with your company. That being said, you do also need to make sure that you have a consistent and eye-catching logo, a pleasing color scheme, an engaging bio, a standard text or boilerplate, and an easily recognized company name. Some businesses like to alter their logo’s style slightly to suit the characteristics of different networks, depending on the size of the given photo space and the concerns of the specific audiences they’re trying to reach. Whatever you choose to do in this respect, the most important element is to ensure that all of your company’s profiles have a common theme that consumers can always identify as relating specifically to your brand.

The process of building your own brand involves the following basic steps:
Carefully study your target audience and competition.
Determine your brand’s main focus and personality or character.
Select a name for your business that’s easy to recognize and remember.
Create a catchy and upbeat company slogan.
Decide on your brand’s appearance (colors and font).
Design your brand logo so as to be both memorable and attractive.
Apply your branding throughout all the phases of your business.

Produce a well-written and highly informative blog

Another one of the most effective methods for building brand identity is maintaining a blog, which provides a focal point for you to give consumers advice, tools, and information related to your field and business. Keeping a blog also has the advantage of increasing your rank on search engines. A well-written and informative business blog can enhance your image as a trustworthy brand and also provide an effective approach that employs content marketing to expand your brand’s online presence.

Produce instructional videos to post on your website and on social media

As the acceptance and use of online video grow worldwide, companies need to create a well-defined strategy for conducting video marketing, especially in the realm of social media. Generating your own attention-grabbing, high-quality video content is the ideal means to stay relevant in the increasingly competitive paint-contracting market. The recent upsurge in new video platforms and formats like IGTV, Vimeo, and TikTok offers vast untapped opportunities for building your brand. In your videos, you can introduce viewers to cutting-edge services that you offer, such as the installation of top-quality whiteboard coated walls in all types of settings.

Contribute to internet forums to engage with current and potential customers

Join forums and tell your company’s story – who founded it, where and how it began, your plans for future growth, and so on. Discuss your company’s values and policies both in the forums and on the ‘About Us’ page of your company website. By implementing this strategy, you can help to present yourself and your business as an efficient and highly conscientious agency through which customers can get their painting work done safely and professionally during the challenging COVID-19 period.

Other ways to improve your marketing strategy

Painting contractors face intense competition in promoting their businesses these days when online marketing is no longer just an option but a vital necessity, and simply having a company website is not enough. It’s now necessary for businesses to have a broad social media presence, create persuasive ad campaigns, and have an effective long-term online advertising scheme. Moreover, in the Covid-19 context, you’ll have to adjust your normal approach to online marketing. Since the pandemic began, online platforms have seen a sharp increase in traffic and sales. You can take advantage of this trend by doing the following.
1. Expand and enhance your existing high-performing ads.
2. Find new sales leads and expand your present email marketing list.
3. Generate new ads for your business and enlarge the size of your target audience.
4. Publish strongly positive customer reviews about your brand.

Conduct an in-depth analysis of your competition

To survive as a company, the quality and service provided by your painting business need to be superior to that of your competitors. Take advantage of the Covid-19 situation to check out what your competitors are doing to adjust to the changing times. All you need to do is search online for painting companies in your area. Then carefully examine their websites to determine what they’re doing that differs from your approach, and feel free to improve and expand on their methods in terms of pricing, services, products, and marketing strategies such as branding.

Choose a niche market and become a specialist in that area

To set yourself apart from the rest of the pack, you need to become the best and most unique brand among the many painting companies operating in your area. And one way to do so is to become a specialist. The various types of painting jobs generally available include interiors, exteriors, private buildings, office buildings, and others. After studying the varieties of work that your competitors are doing, you can choose a specific painting niche among the many categories available. You may specialize, for instance, in installing dry erase coatings in both commercial and residential structures. There may be as few as 1,000 local jobs open in this specialized corner of the market. However, there are probably no more than a couple of contractors offering such a painting service in your area. So, the odds of your being hired are good, especially during the current COVID-19 era, when many people are working and teaching at home, and high-quality whiteboard walls in private residences are growing rapidly in use and popularity.

WhiteBoard Paint

HOSTING AN EFFECTIVE MEETING WITH A WHITEBOARD WALL

Hosting an Effective Meeting with a Whiteboard Wall
Holding a successful business meeting is a bit like landing a space module on the planet Mars. Keeping track of the seemingly infinite variables involved in the process appears hopeless, and conducting the perfect team gathering never seems to work out quite as you had planned. But unproductive company meetings aren’t as inevitable as they may seem. With the right communication tools and a touch of inspiration, you can conduct the meeting of your dreams every time you and your team members get together. One such communication tool is the premium whiteboard wall, which offers a highly durable and virtually endless space for presenting facts, expressing opinions, and coming up with creative ideas for product launches, marketing schemes, and the like.

Make meetings a team activity

To have your meetings become more than personal lectures by you, the organizer, it’s a good idea to take regular advantage of the distinctive viewpoints, experiences, and skillsets of your team members at all of your business get-togethers. Doing so can provide you with great opportunities to make your meetings more efficient, collaborative, and worthwhile, thus enhancing your company’s creativity, productivity, and bottom line.

Organize a Discussion

With the appropriate organization and guidance, collective dialog can bring about a more engaging meeting and generate more new and unique solutions to problems than a traditional lecture, even when a question-and-answer session is included. Devoting a specific segment of your meeting schedule to a brainstorming session is an excellent way to stimulate such group dialog. As the meeting coordinator, your job is to outline the goals of the session and to work in conjunction with your team to expand on ideas they come up with during the brainstorming process. With small groups, it’s easy to encourage free conversation among all the members present, but with large groups, it’s difficult. Thus, it’s more effective to separate the participants in a large meeting into smaller clusters then reunite them after a specific time period to discuss everyone’s ideas in the large group context.

Use Your Whiteboard Wall to Practice “Brainwriting”

Brainstorming is a key part of meetings where top-quality whiteboard-coated walls come into play. For both small and large gatherings, the quality of group discussions can be optimized by using the vast canvas of a whiteboard wall. In smaller meetings, a massive whiteboard wall provides ample room for everyone in attendance to brainstorm together through the use of mind maps, free association, and a host of other methods. In large meetings, however, it’s best to make use of the ample writing area of a whiteboard wall by first dividing the participants into small groups then asking them to use different segments of the wall to record their individual brainstorming ideas.

One novel brainstorming approach that’s popular today is known as “brainwriting.” In this partially nonverbal method, the participants use pieces of paper to write down three original ideas related to the session’s topic. Then after a designated number of minutes, the team members pass their ideas to the individuals on their right, who build from these ideas, adding bullet points, new creative approaches, etc. Next, after another several minutes, all the participants pass the pieces of paper again until the papers have gone all the way around the group. Once the ideas have made it completely around the circle, the participants deliberate and choose which ones are best suited for further discussion.

By ensuring that everyone has a chance to contribute and by removing the common bias favoring the first idea presented, this strategy helps alleviate two of brainstorming’s most significant drawbacks — lop-sided conversations and the anchoring effect, whereby people rely too much on the first piece of information presented to draw subsequent conclusions during the decision making process.

Brainwriting can be even more effectively performed on the vast open surface of a whiteboard wall. Instead of using small pieces of paper to write down ideas related to the session’s topic, participants can write their thoughts on separate sections of the whiteboard wall in large lettering for all to see. Then after a set number of minutes, each team member can move to a different part of the wall and build on the ideas written by the previous writer, adding as much creative input as they want. Next, after another few minutes, the participants move again until they’ve given their input on all the sections of the wall written on by the group. Finally, now that the initial three ideas and subsequent contributions of all the participants have been posted on the wall, the group can review one another’s thoughts and choose those that are the most interesting and worthy of further discussion.

In such an exercise, compared to the cramped writing spaces of notepaper, the vast area of a whiteboard wall promotes more intensive levels of creative thought. Individuals tend to feel freer to express their novel ideas when confronted by the large open-ended surface of a whiteboard wall. Also, using a smooth-flowing dry erase marker as opposed to a small pen also tends to stimulate people to freely bring forth whatever is on their minds. These qualities can be of great benefit in practicing brainwriting because having much more space to write on in much larger letters tends to trigger ideas that might not arise when a person is confined to using 8 ½” by 11” notepaper as a writing surface.

Make Use of Free Association aka Rapid Ideation

In rapid ideation, meeting participants write down all the ideas that come to mind in a designated amount of time before anything is discussed, analyzed, or expanded upon. When practicing this brainstorming technique, you’ll have to establish a time limit, or else you’ll risk losing the feeling of urgency among your team members.

This brainstorming technique can be helpful in avoiding the common problem of having an idea shelved before it has a chance to grow and develop. By letting all meeting attendees bring forth their thoughts before any critiquing begins, rapid ideation eliminates the premature quashing of potentially great ideas and lets them flow out without constraints. The time limit can also help to prevent people from talking themselves out of an idea before they even begin sharing it with others—a frequent brainstorming mistake.

Use Your Whiteboard Wall as a Medium for Visual Aids

Including finely crafted visual components in your meeting presentations can enhance communications with team members, making them feel more engaged and interested in the content you present. Employing well-produced slides and other high-quality visual media such as films and diagrams can help participants to better comprehend and feel involved with your material, and a whiteboard wall is an ideal surface on which to perform such visual work. Designing and conducting graphic presentations are becoming increasingly essential tasks for doing business in today’s high-tech world of telecommuting and virtual communications.

Record All Significant Ideas and Input for Current and Future Reference

When you do a virtual meeting presentation, you should make a habit of writing down all the significant ideas and data put forward by the attendees on your whiteboard coated wall for all your team members to view and provide feedback on as the meeting progresses. Then you can erase and add more textual content and visuals whenever fresh ideas and information come up. The large dimensions and easy visibility of the content on your whiteboard wall will enhance the quality of your presentations, your communications with team members, and your team’s note-taking during virtual meetings, thus helping you to develop your individual brand and professional persona and boost your company’s productivity and profits. Then, after your virtual meetings are finished, you can take pictures of the results that you and the team members produced on the whiteboard wall and send them to the participants and other relevant parties for future reference and input.

WhiteBoard Paint

HOSTING AN EFFECTIVE MEETING WITH A WHITEBOARD WALL

Hosting an Effective Meeting with a Whiteboard Wall
Holding a successful business meeting is a bit like landing a space module on the planet Mars. Keeping track of the seemingly infinite variables involved in the process appears hopeless, and conducting the perfect team gathering never seems to work out quite as you had planned. But unproductive company meetings aren’t as inevitable as they may seem. With the right communication tools and a touch of inspiration, you can conduct the meeting of your dreams every time you and your team members get together. One such communication tool is the premium whiteboard wall, which offers a highly durable and virtually endless space for presenting facts, expressing opinions, and coming up with creative ideas for product launches, marketing schemes, and the like.

Make meetings a team activity

To have your meetings become more than personal lectures by you, the organizer, it’s a good idea to take regular advantage of the distinctive viewpoints, experiences, and skillsets of your team members at all of your business get-togethers. Doing so can provide you with great opportunities to make your meetings more efficient, collaborative, and worthwhile, thus enhancing your company’s creativity, productivity, and bottom line.

Organize a Discussion

With the appropriate organization and guidance, collective dialog can bring about a more engaging meeting and generate more new and unique solutions to problems than a traditional lecture, even when a question-and-answer session is included. Devoting a specific segment of your meeting schedule to a brainstorming session is an excellent way to stimulate such group dialog. As the meeting coordinator, your job is to outline the goals of the session and to work in conjunction with your team to expand on ideas they come up with during the brainstorming process. With small groups, it’s easy to encourage free conversation among all the members present, but with large groups, it’s difficult. Thus, it’s more effective to separate the participants in a large meeting into smaller clusters then reunite them after a specific time period to discuss everyone’s ideas in the large group context.

Use Your Whiteboard Wall to Practice “Brainwriting”

Brainstorming is a key part of meetings where top-quality whiteboard-coated walls come into play. For both small and large gatherings, the quality of group discussions can be optimized by using the vast canvas of a whiteboard wall. In smaller meetings, a massive whiteboard wall provides ample room for everyone in attendance to brainstorm together through the use of mind maps, free association, and a host of other methods. In large meetings, however, it’s best to make use of the ample writing area of a whiteboard wall by first dividing the participants into small groups then asking them to use different segments of the wall to record their individual brainstorming ideas.

One novel brainstorming approach that’s popular today is known as “brainwriting.” In this partially nonverbal method, the participants use pieces of paper to write down three original ideas related to the session’s topic. Then after a designated number of minutes, the team members pass their ideas to the individuals on their right, who build from these ideas, adding bullet points, new creative approaches, etc. Next, after another several minutes, all the participants pass the pieces of paper again until the papers have gone all the way around the group. Once the ideas have made it completely around the circle, the participants deliberate and choose which ones are best suited for further discussion.

By ensuring that everyone has a chance to contribute and by removing the common bias favoring the first idea presented, this strategy helps alleviate two of brainstorming’s most significant drawbacks — lop-sided conversations and the anchoring effect, whereby people rely too much on the first piece of information presented to draw subsequent conclusions during the decision making process.

Brainwriting can be even more effectively performed on the vast open surface of a whiteboard wall. Instead of using small pieces of paper to write down ideas related to the session’s topic, participants can write their thoughts on separate sections of the whiteboard wall in large lettering for all to see. Then after a set number of minutes, each team member can move to a different part of the wall and build on the ideas written by the previous writer, adding as much creative input as they want. Next, after another few minutes, the participants move again until they’ve given their input on all the sections of the wall written on by the group. Finally, now that the initial three ideas and subsequent contributions of all the participants have been posted on the wall, the group can review one another’s thoughts and choose those that are the most interesting and worthy of further discussion.

In such an exercise, compared to the cramped writing spaces of notepaper, the vast area of a whiteboard wall promotes more intensive levels of creative thought. Individuals tend to feel freer to express their novel ideas when confronted by the large open-ended surface of a whiteboard wall. Also, using a smooth-flowing dry erase marker as opposed to a small pen also tends to stimulate people to freely bring forth whatever is on their minds. These qualities can be of great benefit in practicing brainwriting because having much more space to write on in much larger letters tends to trigger ideas that might not arise when a person is confined to using 8 ½” by 11” notepaper as a writing surface.

Make Use of Free Association aka Rapid Ideation

In rapid ideation, meeting participants write down all the ideas that come to mind in a designated amount of time before anything is discussed, analyzed, or expanded upon. When practicing this brainstorming technique, you’ll have to establish a time limit, or else you’ll risk losing the feeling of urgency among your team members.

This brainstorming technique can be helpful in avoiding the common problem of having an idea shelved before it has a chance to grow and develop. By letting all meeting attendees bring forth their thoughts before any critiquing begins, rapid ideation eliminates the premature quashing of potentially great ideas and lets them flow out without constraints. The time limit can also help to prevent people from talking themselves out of an idea before they even begin sharing it with others—a frequent brainstorming mistake.

Use Your Whiteboard Wall as a Medium for Visual Aids

Including finely crafted visual components in your meeting presentations can enhance communications with team members, making them feel more engaged and interested in the content you present. Employing well-produced slides and other high-quality visual media such as films and diagrams can help participants to better comprehend and feel involved with your material, and a whiteboard wall is an ideal surface on which to perform such visual work. Designing and conducting graphic presentations are becoming increasingly essential tasks for doing business in today’s high-tech world of telecommuting and virtual communications.

Record All Significant Ideas and Input for Current and Future Reference

When you do a virtual meeting presentation, you should make a habit of writing down all the significant ideas and data put forward by the attendees on your whiteboard coated wall for all your team members to view and provide feedback on as the meeting progresses. Then you can erase and add more textual content and visuals whenever fresh ideas and information come up. The large dimensions and easy visibility of the content on your whiteboard wall will enhance the quality of your presentations, your communications with team members, and your team’s note-taking during virtual meetings, thus helping you to develop your individual brand and professional persona and boost your company’s productivity and profits. Then, after your virtual meetings are finished, you can take pictures of the results that you and the team members produced on the whiteboard wall and send them to the participants and other relevant parties for future reference and input.

Whiteboard Wall Paint

HOSTING AN EFFECTIVE MEETING WITH A WHITEBOARD WALL

Hosting an Effective Meeting with a Whiteboard Wall
Holding a successful business meeting is a bit like landing a space module on the planet Mars. Keeping track of the seemingly infinite variables involved in the process appears hopeless, and conducting the perfect team gathering never seems to work out quite as you had planned. But unproductive company meetings aren’t as inevitable as they may seem. With the right communication tools and a touch of inspiration, you can conduct the meeting of your dreams every time you and your team members get together. One such communication tool is the premium whiteboard wall, which offers a highly durable and virtually endless space for presenting facts, expressing opinions, and coming up with creative ideas for product launches, marketing schemes, and the like.

Make meetings a team activity

To have your meetings become more than personal lectures by you, the organizer, it’s a good idea to take regular advantage of the distinctive viewpoints, experiences, and skillsets of your team members at all of your business get-togethers. Doing so can provide you with great opportunities to make your meetings more efficient, collaborative, and worthwhile, thus enhancing your company’s creativity, productivity, and bottom line.

Organize a Discussion

With the appropriate organization and guidance, collective dialog can bring about a more engaging meeting and generate more new and unique solutions to problems than a traditional lecture, even when a question-and-answer session is included. Devoting a specific segment of your meeting schedule to a brainstorming session is an excellent way to stimulate such group dialog. As the meeting coordinator, your job is to outline the goals of the session and to work in conjunction with your team to expand on ideas they come up with during the brainstorming process. With small groups, it’s easy to encourage free conversation among all the members present, but with large groups, it’s difficult. Thus, it’s more effective to separate the participants in a large meeting into smaller clusters then reunite them after a specific time period to discuss everyone’s ideas in the large group context.

Use Your Whiteboard Wall to Practice “Brainwriting”

Brainstorming is a key part of meetings where top-quality whiteboard-coated walls come into play. For both small and large gatherings, the quality of group discussions can be optimized by using the vast canvas of a whiteboard wall. In smaller meetings, a massive whiteboard wall provides ample room for everyone in attendance to brainstorm together through the use of mind maps, free association, and a host of other methods. In large meetings, however, it’s best to make use of the ample writing area of a whiteboard wall by first dividing the participants into small groups then asking them to use different segments of the wall to record their individual brainstorming ideas.

One novel brainstorming approach that’s popular today is known as “brainwriting.” In this partially nonverbal method, the participants use pieces of paper to write down three original ideas related to the session’s topic. Then after a designated number of minutes, the team members pass their ideas to the individuals on their right, who build from these ideas, adding bullet points, new creative approaches, etc. Next, after another several minutes, all the participants pass the pieces of paper again until the papers have gone all the way around the group. Once the ideas have made it completely around the circle, the participants deliberate and choose which ones are best suited for further discussion.

By ensuring that everyone has a chance to contribute and by removing the common bias favoring the first idea presented, this strategy helps alleviate two of brainstorming’s most significant drawbacks — lop-sided conversations and the anchoring effect, whereby people rely too much on the first piece of information presented to draw subsequent conclusions during the decision making process.

Brainwriting can be even more effectively performed on the vast open surface of a whiteboard wall. Instead of using small pieces of paper to write down ideas related to the session’s topic, participants can write their thoughts on separate sections of the whiteboard wall in large lettering for all to see. Then after a set number of minutes, each team member can move to a different part of the wall and build on the ideas written by the previous writer, adding as much creative input as they want. Next, after another few minutes, the participants move again until they’ve given their input on all the sections of the wall written on by the group. Finally, now that the initial three ideas and subsequent contributions of all the participants have been posted on the wall, the group can review one another’s thoughts and choose those that are the most interesting and worthy of further discussion.

In such an exercise, compared to the cramped writing spaces of notepaper, the vast area of a whiteboard wall promotes more intensive levels of creative thought. Individuals tend to feel freer to express their novel ideas when confronted by the large open-ended surface of a whiteboard wall. Also, using a smooth-flowing dry erase marker as opposed to a small pen also tends to stimulate people to freely bring forth whatever is on their minds. These qualities can be of great benefit in practicing brainwriting because having much more space to write on in much larger letters tends to trigger ideas that might not arise when a person is confined to using 8 ½” by 11” notepaper as a writing surface.

Make Use of Free Association aka Rapid Ideation

In rapid ideation, meeting participants write down all the ideas that come to mind in a designated amount of time before anything is discussed, analyzed, or expanded upon. When practicing this brainstorming technique, you’ll have to establish a time limit, or else you’ll risk losing the feeling of urgency among your team members.

This brainstorming technique can be helpful in avoiding the common problem of having an idea shelved before it has a chance to grow and develop. By letting all meeting attendees bring forth their thoughts before any critiquing begins, rapid ideation eliminates the premature quashing of potentially great ideas and lets them flow out without constraints. The time limit can also help to prevent people from talking themselves out of an idea before they even begin sharing it with others—a frequent brainstorming mistake.

Use Your Whiteboard Wall as a Medium for Visual Aids

Including finely crafted visual components in your meeting presentations can enhance communications with team members, making them feel more engaged and interested in the content you present. Employing well-produced slides and other high-quality visual media such as films and diagrams can help participants to better comprehend and feel involved with your material, and a whiteboard wall is an ideal surface on which to perform such visual work. Designing and conducting graphic presentations are becoming increasingly essential tasks for doing business in today’s high-tech world of telecommuting and virtual communications.

Record All Significant Ideas and Input for Current and Future Reference

When you do a virtual meeting presentation, you should make a habit of writing down all the significant ideas and data put forward by the attendees on your whiteboard coated wall for all your team members to view and provide feedback on as the meeting progresses. Then you can erase and add more textual content and visuals whenever fresh ideas and information come up. The large dimensions and easy visibility of the content on your whiteboard wall will enhance the quality of your presentations, your communications with team members, and your team’s note-taking during virtual meetings, thus helping you to develop your individual brand and professional persona and boost your company’s productivity and profits. Then, after your virtual meetings are finished, you can take pictures of the results that you and the team members produced on the whiteboard wall and send them to the participants and other relevant parties for future reference and input.

Dry Erase Paint