Interactive Whiteboards

I teach in a school with IWBs or Interactive Whiteboards. My school has a junior school and a senior school, and in the junior school, the word is that the teachers and students use the IWBs a lot more.

My own anecdotal research (ie I asked some staff members and students) seems to suggest that in the senior school, the IWBs are not getting quite the workout that they should be. Most teachers I talked to seemed to use the IWBs as projection screens for the most part.

So what is going on here? Why has one section of the school seemingly embraced the technology and another failed to. I’m not sure. It might be the demographics; the junior school teachers are younger on average. It might be the shift in academic focus from the exploratory junior year levels to the assessment-driven senior years.

My recent suggestion to a person higher up in the school hierarchy – that we use the expertise we already have in the school to train those less familiar with IWB technology – was rejected outright on the basis that they weren’t very useful in the senior year levels.

I have used the handwriting recognition with Chinese characters to good effect. You have to write the characters correctly the first time, because the recognition is pretty unforgiving and if students try to fix a character they’ve written, it counts as another stroke and becomes unrecognisable.

Another use I like is taking a student’s work or another text and annotating it. It’s useful for students to see what I look for in a good piece of writing and have discussion about what’s good.

There is the danger that these sort of school investments will be “technology led” and not “education led”, and I think in my school’s case, that is what’s happened, although I think there’s a certain amount of “keeping up with the Jones’s led”. Other schools have the tech, so we get the tech…

I’ve always said that buying the physical infrastructure of these types of things is easy. But it’s what you do with it that matters. And if the majority of staff are ignorant, untrained and disinterested, there’s a pretty high barrier to meaningful engagement with the technology. We have to see what’s possible, we have to learn how to do it, and we need to see a benefit.

If you’ve been teaching for 20 or 30 years without it, it’s easy to understand why you might be resistant. For some of the rest of us, it’s all about small forays into using it, armed with the knowledge that temporary setbacks might not mean total defeat.