Interactive Whiteboards
Activity and Learning Teaching IWBs Other-ICT
Teachers had a variety of systems for organising pupils at the board in front of the whole class – turn-taking, representative of group, representative of idea. The turn-taking procedure was not used to ensure all pupils participated for the sake of it, but to maintain engagement and, in primary schools, to provide a model for ensuring participation when groups of pupils took responsibility for activity at the board.
Pupils working at the front of the class usually had an effect on the rest of the class which was different from when the teacher was doing the work – empathy from other pupils and the unpredictability of the outcome on the board tended to maintain engagement and participation from class. Pupils who came up to work on the IWB were given advice spontaneously by other class members and there was no sense that pupils would be ridiculed if they got something wrong. Class advice on actions and, more rarely, discussion of reasons were also orchestrated by teacher.
The IWB gave something more visual and dynamic to look at, so that pupils spent longer looking at the board rather than the teacher. Presentations using the IWB were able to engage young learners for longer than traditional pictures and flash cards, and there tended to be more variety of approach. Few teachers used the full features of the IWB – most used drag-and-drop or just projection – but these had the potential for generating classroom discussion and were sometimes used in this way.
The ordinary whiteboard/flipchart was often used as well or instead of the IWB even when the IWB available, and was often equally/more suited to the teacher’s purpose. The ordinary whiteboard was used both for display of material which needed continual reference during the lesson and, in secondary maths, for ephemeral notes/diagrams which referred to a particular display on the IWB. Teachers rarely used the annotation facility of IWB software to build representations of knowledge with the class.
The communal nature of the IWB, combined with the culture of valuing mistakes for their learning potential, may have facilitated the exposure of pupils’ misconceptions. The potential to generate and resolve cognitive conflict was less often exploited, however, and most pupils were keen to learn ‘the right way to do it’ so that they did not make the same mistake again, rather than gaining an understanding which would improve their work more generally.The IWB was able to give better support for reflection than manual tools – particularly sharing ideas with the whole class (mainly in the form of Powerpoint presentations), displaying pupils’ work and reviewing what was done on the board earlier in the lesson. There was little evidence of this being used to support reflection at deeper levels such as abstraction and generalisation, however.
The ‘technical interactivity’ of the IWB was used to support pedagogical interactivity, but mainly in that the projected images provide something to discuss or ask questions about. Whole-class interaction which influenced the course of activity on the board was not observed widely. In maths, there was often a focus on what was presented as an outcome on the board rather than the process of doing maths.