There’s another one of those ‘interactive whiteboards are evil because all they do is encourage slavish kowtowing to technology and blind the users to any other methods, tools or approaches’ arguments going on in the ELT world. It started in the forums on the Cardiff Online Site and has since spilled over into Twitter with a few contributors keeping the debate alive.
I said pretty much all I wanted to say about IWBs in an article entitled ‘Interactive, Quite Bored’ over three years ago, the major points of which I will restate here:
- They’re a waste of money unless you have the money to waste
I heard a lot of protests to this argument, mostly along the lines of ‘prices are coming down and soon we’ll all have one’. Yet, a few years later, it is still only the elite of teaching centres that do actually have them. Prices have come down, of course, but not significantly – and in most schools which balk at replacing CD players, they are still only a dream. In a profession where teachers get little CPD, I would still rather see spare cash spent on people than on machines. And, of course, in countries where the electricity supply is unreliable, or where kids often don’t get three square meals a day, I’d rather the money was spent on remedying those situations.
- They *can* lead to a more teacher-centred, heads-up, lock step approach.
I stand by this, because I’ve seen it happen a lot. Mostly this has been due to a lack of training for teachers, or a paucity of decent materials with which to work. However, I think it’s worth noting that this is not the fault of the IWB… Indeed, where training has been given (the UK state system, as one example), I’ve been lucky enough to observe some very creative, and participatory, use of IWBs. Clearly, then, it is possible to use them in other ways to the ways we often see them being used – and that comes down to training and experience. And that argument holds true for coursebooks and any of our other tools. - ELT materials for IWBs are rubbish
They were over three years ago, and they still are. I don’t need a workbook in IWB format. Being able to interact with listening material on a big board is about exciting as watching paint dry. And about as useful, too. I have, however (as noted in my original article) seen fantastic resources for maths, science and other subjects. Perhaps IWBs aren’t suited to ELT, or perhaps we just haven’t been very good at exploiting them and designing for them yet. - There’s not much interaction
Studies carried out by the British Council in that time concluded that learners seldom got a chance to ‘interact’ with the tool, and I would imagine that’s the case still. If you want plenty of interaction you can invest in voting eggs, but how much fun can they be on a long term basis? - Those pens make my skin crawl
Like polystyrene, the sound of those pens scratching and banging on a hard surface really test my concentration and comfort levels. Admittedly, that may just be me, but when using one I generally find myself typing on the keyboard (the real one, not the useless ‘virtual’ one.
I do wonder, though, how many of the detractors have actually used one for longer than five minutes, and in an actual teaching or training context… I’ve had IWBs on various teacher training courses over the past three years and have, on occasion, used them. But I still can’t shake the feeling that you really can do most of what an IWB offers with a data projector and some imagination (and a decent Net connection). The pleasure of the little ‘reveal’ tools and highlighting gadgets, etc., is short-lived. It often takes longer to set these things up than it does to use them (as with things like voting eggs).
Indeed, inventive teachers such as Tim Rylands get fantastic results with a copy of an old computer game and a date projector – not an IWB in sight. But that’s not to say that he couldn’t incorporate the IWB in the amazing work he’s doing. He incorporates graphic design, music composition, desktop publishing and a myriad of tools. And perhaps that’s the point – having a wide repertoire and knowing what tool, method and approach works best in each context. Surely that’s blindingly obvious.
But at least I have used them, more than a few times, and for more than thirty seconds. If you’re a ‘pedagogical detractor’, how much time have you spent using them? Do you base your criticisms on your own practice, or on examples of bad practice that you cling to to support your arguments? Or have you only truly seen examples of bad practice and moronic devotion? I think we should be told.
I don’t have much truck with people who write them off piecemeal as the devil’s work. Slavish devotion to any tool, or indeed any method, will make for an unbalanced approach to teaching and learning. I’ve yet to see an IWB devotee spend their entire class standing at the front using the board – good teachers tend to choose from a wide repertoire of tools, approaches, methods and activities – so why should the IWB change their habits? Where I have seen them used creatively, it has usually been as a tool for calling up net-based resources and using them as a basis for a class. Whether that merits the investment is dubious at best.
But most detractors will try to convince you that teachers who use IWBs have become beholden to the technology, blinded by the ‘point and click’, shrouded in the ‘wow factor’. To me this suggests a complete lack of faith in teachers, as if we’re saying that our trained, experienced professional workforce are blinded by the lights of the one-armed bandit of education. Surely we must have more faith in the people we work with – if the ‘wow’ factor is so demonstrably short-lived in learners, why do we struggle to conclude that the same might happen in teachers?
An IWB will not perforce make a stimulating teacher less or more stimulating. It will also not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear of a teacher. But then neither will an ‘approach’ or ‘method’. If you’re dull as ditchwater and your learners are dull as ditchwater, then ‘teacher and learner as sole resource’ isn’t going to get you very far. Or is that an impossible scenario? Is it the case that poor teachers can be easily misled and blinded by science, but we can’t envisage the case that teachers and learners might actually (on occasions) be a little bit dull? Why does technology rile some people so much? Where does their fear or disdain come from?
What I think is the following:
- An IWB is another tool in the arsenal for teachers. Whilst some would have us throw out every tool available to teachers (audio, video, PowerPoint, photocopies, computers, coursebooks, etc.) I say it would be better to help teachers towards an understanding of the potential and the pitfalls of each tool or resource and let them decide which would be useful in each context and with each group of learners. Teachers can be clever, thinking people – let them decide what they need.
- Eschewing technology – or suggesting that teachers are too uncritical of technology – suggests a holier than thou attitude which does nobody any good. Why do we assume that teachers can be critical of everything apart from technology? Are teachers with technology like the Gollum with ‘the precious’? So blinded by the buttons that we lose all reason? No, frankly I don’t think so.
- Let’s not feel threatened by the popularity of technology – it’s the modern world, you know! The days of slavish devotion to other media, methods or tools may be over and we too have to move on a little. Of course, some things from the past still have merit and we should take them with us, but instead of thrusting forward with them alone, let’s try to integrate them into the 21st century with the good things of the current age, because there are some. In fact there are many – and the teachers I know do not adopt each new tool blindly, but rather they experiment with them, test them, probe them and think about how they might enhance their teaching. Then they try them out, reflect, rethink and move forward. These teachers understand the concept of communities of practice and leverage the good of technology to push the envelope of their teaching. They are not hapless slaves of flashing LEDs – let’s give them a break!
- Let’s not assume that we know better than younger, less experienced teachers all the time. We grew up in an age when the person standing at the front of the class was all-powerful, whereas younger people have easy access to a range of experts online and have learnt how to weigh all the options and opinions to their advantage. We are one voice amongst many and we will need to prove our worth in any argument – basing it on our own practical experience (in the cae of IWBs) would be one good place to start…
Hi Gavin – I agree!!
I am in the very fortunate situation of being a trainer, mainly for primary teachers and in the UK where IWBs are in most classrooms. I always feel under attack when educators attack IWBs as useless, white elephants etc., as I spend a huge amount of my training time using them, in fact I do take it for granted these days that I will have one in any session and often can be found running courses on how to use them effectively in the classroom or training in the same way in schools. In reality having used them almost daily now for about eight years I really struggle to manage without one. There are a huge number of children and teachers that have watched me, over the years, touch an ordinary whiteboard expecting it to spring into life and giggled delightedly at my stupidity as I have to back to the computer to get the expected reaction.
Even when I decide I am not going to be drawn this is one subject that always does it
I am doing workshops on E-safety in a conference on Tuesday and have already have a quandary about how to record the findings from the discussions without an IWB – back to paper and pens – what a shock!
I will have to type up the responses and circulate them instead of hitting the print button.
It may be that they are better suited to the needs of the primary / secondary education than an adult curriculum, though in training adults daily I nearly always use one, or, as you have suggested, they are not yet used effectively in ELT teaching.
Here are some guides to, and case studies on using the IWB effectively – from the UK – but may be useful to anyone who understands English http://www.schoolzone.co.uk/resources/IWB/subjects.asp The studies are 5 years old now but were carried out to verify the value of the IWB before they were put into all UK schools. I have been trying to track down other studies but most links are now broken, the reports have been taken down they are so old.
Most primary classrooms in UK now have an IWB and would not be without it, it is very rare to go into a school and not find one in the classroom. I am quite sure it is a case of it is not a bad tool though there may well be poor use of it but wholesale dismissal of their value is upsetting and does not encourage exciting, innovative, motivating lessons of the type I frequently see.
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This debate reminds me of the debate on the death penalty. It’s over! IWBs are in most primary and secondary classrooms now, though many teachers, I suppose, do not use them on a regular basis. Here is what they do for many of us language teachers:
1. Great source of high quality visual aids.
2. Offer degress of interactivity (e.g. interactive websites, Boardworks etc)
3. Great for online video streaming sites with listening (e.g. Curiosphere in French and many, many others)
4. Great for playing with text (e.g. cloze, hiding sections of text, using the curtain and peep-hole tools)
5. Great for showing foreign language films.
6. Good for changing colour of text and highlighting text.
7. Great for instant reference to online resources like dictionaries, exam mark schemes, specifications and pictures.
Language lessons do need to be very teacher-led in the early stages, so no-one need be apologetic about teaching from the front. The “lock step” approach is proven. We are now, thankfully, in an age of enlightened eclecticism in language teaching and the IWB is one very useful tool in our armoury.
Others could add to this list, I am sure.
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Steve,
All of your examples can be done for far less money and effort using a data projector and PowerPoint and/or the sites and resources you mention. So the question for me still remains:
1) Why spend 2K on an IWB kit and installation?
2) Why not spend that on underpaid teachers instead?
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I agree with Gavin, but I am particularly concerned about technohype. I think IWBs CAN be useful. However, a good deal of what I have seen done with IWBs can also be done just as effectively with a laptop/projector/screen setup.
I was at a conference in a UK university a couple of years ago. Someone asked why there was not a single IWB to be seen and wouldn’t students coming through from schools with IWBs wonder why this was so and be disappointed at the poor provision of technology. The answer was simple: the lecture rooms were too big. If you sat in a row threequarters of the way from the front you probably would not be able to read the screen, even if very large font was used.
I attended a business presentation a couple of weeks ago in which the presenter used a laptop/projector setup and a very large screen. There were about 20 of us. He was a skillful presenter and kept our attention by constantly asking questions relating to the slides and videos that he showed and initiating group discussions. We all had voting pads, which we used to answer series of questions at regular intervals. It’s a question of the singer not the song.
There is also the Health and Safety issue of teachers staring into a bright light for n hours per day – which could be solved by better positioning of the projector, but often this is not done.
Graham
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My biggest concerns with IWBs are the constant hum of the fan and the need to block out the sun and the view outside the window in order to make it visible. To give just one stat from the latest Scientific American Mind:
“In one school district… students in the sunniest classrooms advanced 26 percent faster in reading and 20 percent faster in math in one year than did those with the least daylight in their classrooms” (Vol 20 No 2 pg 57)
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Let’s see now…
Chalk (like an IWB) is a tool which may be used in a classroom. However, chalk (like an IWB) requires an intermediary in order to work. We shall call this intermediary ‘the teacher’.
This ‘teacher’ will use the tool to produce words and pictures on a board (in the case of chalk) or for some modern electrickery (in the case of the IWB).
What the ‘teacher’ produces as she uses the ‘tool’ may contribute to the learning of the ‘student’. However, it’s doubtful that the chalk or the IWB could do the same on their own.
So, any conjectured ‘learning’ or increase in exam results (as the IWB reports will undoubtedly use as the base for their argument) would appear to be driven by the teacher, her talent, experience, ideas, methods and materials, and not by the tool.
Leaving chalk or an IWB in a class of learners and waiting for something to happen will, on average, produce very disappointing learning outcomes.
So, do we really have any justification in hounding chalk or IWBs out of the classroom simply because they don’t increase test scores?
Physician, heal thyself…
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It strikes me that there is a terminology problem involved in these discussions. The beefy part of the technology is what I’ve referred to in the past as a CPS – that stands for Computer, Projector and Screen. The icing on top of that (if indeed you want to put icing on top of beef) is an internet connection. And finally the cherry on top is the IWB. Isn’t an IWB nothing more than a remote control? Why, then, do these discussions centre around remote controls and not the TV sets.
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Jamie,
Yes, I’d go for items in this order: computer, net connection, projector, IWB. However, I think anyone who’s actually used one would say they’re a bit more than a simple remote control – they’re a toolbox which can be used creatively by creative teachers. Another feature that pushes them beyond the ‘remote control’ is the ability to share resources, lesson and materials electronically with other teachers, build up banks of materials, etc…
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Very interesting post, Gavin, and one that deserves a more detailed response than I have time for at the moment. I have to agree with you wholeheartedly though that so many of the critics are basing their judgements on a couple of publisher/ class observations and what they have managed to glean from published reports and articles. Worse still, some of the leading critics have just decided that IWBs are bad and simply look for evidence to prove their point!
A couple of points I’d like to make now about some of the things in your post and a few of the comments that have followed:
1) The IWB is indeed the ‘icing on the cherry’ and you do need the CPS first. However, the CPS is first and forement a whole-class presentation tool (that’s why you see this more at conferences, where the usual format is one person talking to lots of people) and it’s the IWB that turns this presentation tool into a better ‘teaching’ tool, and one that turns it into an ‘interactive’ rather than a ‘whole class teaching’ tool (the major criticisms of the IWB). The big danger here is this kind of tool just being used by teachers to show Youtube clips ( a bit like buying a Jaguar just to take a trip to the corner shop).
2) Training is indeed the key to using the IWB well, and as you say, if there is no money for training in an organisation, it makes no sense to buy IWBs (unless they come free of course – e.g. a government grant). They are indeed expensive tools. However, that said, I do not understood the blind criticism that is targeted against them in other circumstances where they are supported well (with a resources sharing community and enough training time). If you are lucky enough to work in such an environment (and you have taken advantage of the training available to you), then you won’t want to go back to another type of board.
3) IWB published materials are rubbish? I have to say too that the publishers are now moving away from trying to make ‘scanned’ copies of their books with a few extras thrown in, which is a great improvement. At recent conferences, I have seen some tools for the IWB that are very interesting and well thought-out (mainly YL software by CUP, and Manic Monkey’s ‘Little Bridge’)
4) The hide/reveal tools and other things that make the software interesting to use for teaching are actually very easy to set up and use. There are some things that also work very well using an iwb in ELT (hundreds of board game templates that would take ages to set up on a regular board, word ordering activities become fun, pictures of the students used for grouping and other reasons, songs can be prepped on the fly lyrics quickly pasted on the board and turned into an information gap activity almost immediately…I could go on).
You are totally right that actual experience helps here – I have used IWBs for around 4 years now, and so have had hundreds of hours of experience, with students of various levels and ages (from 6 years old to adult). I have also trained teachers to use them and have observed teachers using them. I have seen them being used badly (always by teachers who haven’t had training, who usually try to use it like a regular whiteboard, or as a presentation device), but I have also seen them being used effectively and creatively and I have also noticed a considerable positive effect on the students.
The key here is experience, and there’s a lot of hot air from those who feel threatened that the last bastion of the technophobe teacher (the board) is being transformed before their very eyes. Usually, the most vocal critics are the text-book-writing ex-teachers who know they can’t spare the time to go back and learn how to use this classroom tool. Or worse, they are teacher trainers who try to get away with winging it and would rather pan the tool instead.
The worst situation I have come across is an organisation near me which simply decided to jump on the band-wagon and get themselves a board or two – I guess because they thought it was the thing to do, so they could keep up appearances, etc. They didn’t bother trying to compare the different types available (just bought the first one they saw, or worse – the cheapest one).
I asked the IT manager about use of the IWB and he’d already decided it was a waste of time. The only training anyone had received was an hour’s introduction from the maker (not an ELT specialist or techer). It was obvious that nobody was using it because nobody knew how to use it (common misconception = “Well, it’s just a board, right? I don’t need training to know how to use a board”).
This organisation prides itself on its excellence in teacher training, and is in a position to be ble to afford to train its teachers well how to use an IWB. I guess they are just going through the motions installing an IWB or got one or two because they thought they looked pretty on the wall…
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Hi
This is something we talked through and fought over several years ago.
Have a look at what Djongly School in Nottingham, England are doing. http://islayian.blogspot.com/2006/12/no-iwbs-here.html
We went with Tablet PC’s to all staff and UMPC Tablets to all pupils and wireless Projectors.
2 subject argued for IWB’s, Maths and Music. They had excellent, thought through reasons.
The results we have experienced are that teachers like flexiblity. They like to be able to move amongst the pupils.
The pupils like that (In my case) a short, fat, baldy man isn’t in the way.
We use OneNote to share the 2 metre plus screen space.
As as shared workspaces
But its about knowing what you want to achieve and which tools are best for that.
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[...] Gavin Dudeney véleménye [...]
I am an IWB agnostic. In my old age (now approaching 67) I am becoming an ICT agnostic. I have used a huge range of different technologies in my career as a language teacher, dating back to the humble slide projector and reel-to-reel tape recorder to which I was introduced on my training course in 1964-65. In my first full-time job, from 1968-71, I made regular use of an early cassette-based language lab. I became interested in ICT in 1976, and thereafter it became the backbone of my career, from which I finally retired (well, theoretically anyway) in 2001.
But what has all this technology achieved? Not a lot really, at least not a lot in the UK. We remain the language dunces of Europe. Our main problem, of course, is motivation. We are simply not motivated to learn other languages in the same way as most of the world is motivated to learn English. Many people resent having to learn English, but if they wish to communicate with others it opens the doors to a much wider world, and it often helps them get a job.
In the UK we are forever seeking new ways to motivate language learners. The panacea – at least since the early 1980s when the BBC micro took the educational market by storm – has been technology, and now we find ourselves running faster and faster in order to stand still, to keep motivating our youngsters by offering them new technologies as tools for learning. The latest news is that the government has signed a £6-million contract with RM to develop an Open School for Languages attracting back the thousands of kids aged 14+ who having been opting out of learning foreign languages at school. Will it work? Probably not, but maybe I am just getting cynical. I could think of better things to do with 6 million quid.
Graham
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Let me state right away that I’m not a huge fan of IWB’s either as I explained in my post that sent the trackback above (in Hungarian only – sorry!). Thousands of IWB’s have been installed in Hungarian schools and the Ministry of Education even set up a website to support their use (created by a company selling IWB’s). You should see the “methodology” of that website. I don’t question the good intentions of the MoEd but it seems that some companies simply saw this as an excellent opportunity to make some money and provide “training” just to be able to sell their stuff. Of course I haven’t attended all these various training sessions but the ones I saw basically concentrated on how to operate the IWB and that was it. I shouldn’t blame them though; how could they provide methodology training – they are not teacher trainers, they’re business people (nothing wrong with that). Hire an experienced third party teacher trainer? That would be over the budget. Again, I don’t question their good intentions – they simply come from a different background. They believe that if they sell a decent product at a fair price they do what is required of them – and this is true in the business world. They just don’t realise that the most important issue here is *how* these IWB’s are used. One of them said when I told him about my misgivings: “How could I teach them methodology? I can teach them how to operate this thing but then they are the teachers, they should know how to teach with it.”
And this is why teachers use the IWB as a fancy shiny new board, with the same teaching techniques they used with a blackboard and then with a whiteboard – lecturing to the whole class, with students sitting and looking at each other’s backs. Now teachers can flash out sentences to translate faster than ever. Now teachers can drag the image of a book next to the word “book” on the IWB and students can remain just as bored as ever. Then some teachers decide to have real student interaction and next time it is one of the students that puts the “s” in the sentence “Jane live_ in London”. The rest of the class still remains bored as ever. And teachers are content that they have jumped through the hoop, they’ve demonstrated that they’re very open to modern technology, so if the *** kids still don’t learn, it’s obviously their fault, we’ve done everything we could.
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Jane, you’ve just shown that the investment in training is the most important factor in the equation. We keep coming back to this, but without training teachers how to use the thing properly, you’ve just got an expensive piece of plastic that teachers find difficult to write on. I’m sorry to hear that the Hungarian MoE has wasted their money in this way.
No amount of technology (not an IWB, or a pen or a banana) will make the kids less bored if the pedagogy is flawed – nobody is saying that the IWB is a magic pill to be swallowed to solve all your classroom management problems (on the contrary, it creates different problems that require different solutions) or that it will make your kids learn the language better. However, in the right hands of a teacher who has been trained, I’m convinced it can motivate and help the language learning process (and I have seen this with my own eyes, at the place where I teach – I haven’t read it in a report or heard someone say it, or the contrary, at a conference)
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Oh Graham,
Don’t come at us with your ‘personal experience’ angle… Why, only yesterday I read a report from the Snodgrass Elementary School that quite clearly concluded that IWBs are no more effective than chalk…
Tongue, cheek, moi?
Gavin
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Who ever wrote this artcile really knew what they were talking about.
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Hi Gavin,
I hate this debate.
IWB’s rock.
I could go on at length, but there’s no point.
Hope you’re happy and well
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