Some thoughts on Interactive Whiteboards

This story highlights some of the thoughts we had while observing 2^nd graders and their teacher using an interactive whiteboard while learning basic multiplication.

As said, these are observations made from one single case, thoughts we had – not scientific results. However, we want to share them in open way and hope to create some discussion regarding the Interactive Whiteboards (also known as Smartboards) and use of them.

Creative use of technology

Despite offering a more interactive and multimedia experience, the use of the interactive whiteboard was quite traditional, from a methodological point of view. The session was teacher-centered and the students’ role was quite passive — they answered questions or participated when they were required to, but they were just reproducing content they have been taught during the previous sessions.

From this point of view, it would be arguable what’s the value of technology since a traditional blackboard would have helped achieving the same objectives. Even this is an existing debate in the educational community, it is worth highlighting the need of more creative uses of technology — or different technologies — and teaching and learning methodologies.

Let’s look in detail in the use of the interactive whiteboard and a special audience response system integrated to the interactive whiteboard. Those who have experience of clickers, this audience response system was basically a software based version of those.

Mixing mediated and real content

The teacher used an audience response system during her class. This allowed the students, behind their (school-provided) laptops to enter the answers to a text box. However, the teacher mixed this approach for participation together with face-to-face participation with rising hands and speaking out loud. When questioned, she said that this was a way to keep boredom away, by mixing the modality. This also seemed something that worked somewhat well.

Let’s examine the practices of using the audience response systems in more detail.

Striving for correct answers

An often-cited problem with questioning students is that usually correct answers are expected. This means that students who know the answer to the question will want to answer, and will raise their hands, while those whose knowledge is shakier stay quiet. Audience response system vendors of interactive technologies claim that they allow anonymous answering: everyone answers to their best knowledge, and when the answers are revealed, they see if they were right or wrong without fear of ridicule.

Tarmo and others made an interesting observation that some students typed in their answers, but would not send them until the answers were shown: if they were correct, they would send, otherwise they would edit their answer. Technically, the teacher was able to see what everyone answered, but used that only to point out disruptive behavior. Nevertheless, the anonymity of the tool did not fully remove the tendency of students to only send in correct answers.

Being funny or looking for attention?

We observed that the students used different ways to “customize” their responses, including adding “???!!!!?!” to their answers. As mentioned above, this disruptive behavior was examined by the teacher and she used the tools to get down the students doing this.

Matti started to think, if customizing the answers was a method of getting attention from the teacher or just a way to be playful, as those answers caused giggling in the class. Matti asked few of the students doing that on the reasons, but found out (again) that interviewing children is not that easy: no trivial conclusions could be achieved.

However, this already indicates that the learning situation is more than just getting the information exchanged, or different than constructing new ideas together.

Social ties modify interactions

Tarmo noticed that when students were coming to the board one-by-one and got to choose the next student, friendships and social ties became prevalent.

In one case, another boy was eagarly signing and fidgeting, and calling out “choose me, choose me”. When he was chosen, he was completely unprepared to actually do the assignment on the board. He had only focused on getting the attention of this other boy, for interpersonal reasons.

All together, the session included several different elements: working together using audience response systems, classical work together using the whiteboard or even without any and doing exercises via laptop. This is why we make the following observation regarding the systems:

Time spent in getting ready

The access to the online environment in which students accessed the documents, as well as in the voting system, was time-consuming. Besides, it broke the class dynamic, as some students had problems to access while others were ready and got bored while waiting since they had nothing to do. Considering this is an everyday action, we wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to improve this sort of logistical issues that, despite being minor things, have a great impact in the development of the session.

This story was written together by Anna, Eva, Matti and Tarmo (in alphabetical order).