How do you know when you're using it well?

[Chris Betcher]

What sets a good IWB user apart from an ordinary one? What traits, characteristics, skills or techniques do you think form the basis of effective IWB use? How might you evaluate "good" IWB uses?

For this very first discussion in the forum, I'd be interested to hear what you think constitutes powerful use of the technology.

Is it simply about handing the control to students? Is it about using multimedia? Is it using them in a flexible, creative way? Or is it something else entirely?

How do you know good IWB use when you see it?

[Faraday Pang]

First of all, there must be inspirations.
Something that students will never, or take a long time to get if the lesson was not delivered with IWB. You can see they were inspired when their eyes widened with excitements or a big smile appeared on their faces. Then they started to apply the knowledge.
I witnessed that happened eg once after we used the Voting device to do a class survey in Chinese (wether Australian History/Geography should be compulsory in Year 10 or not), pasted the results (a histogram). Then a girl who voted “For” this subject explained to the class (most of them voted “Against”) in Chinese why should we learn this subject (how it could broaden our views about Australia). We voted again and I pasted a totally different result. Obviously this Aussie girl was very convincing even she was speaking Chinese!
All of us were inspired by the voting process and the student’s speech. We gained knowledge of the reason to study that subject and Chinese, and that all happened in 5 minutes! Then we moved on to discuss other issues using Chinese. Everyone was involved in creating something for discussion for the sake of practising Chinese.
I cannot imagine a more efficient way of delivering that lesson.
It is simply the most efficient and versatile way available to stimulate higher-order thinking.

[Lesleigh Altmann]

The first time I had a glimpse into using the IWB technology well was when I was teaching a class of Year 4 students. We were actively involved in a animated discussion on Australian Colonisation. Although I was prepared for the lesson, the students started to take our learning in a new direction. I became caught up in the success of this engagement and remembered some resources located in our network and in the board's gallery. Without a second thought - I turned around to the board to drop down the appropriate menu ...... and ..... remembered I was in a class with a chalk board not an IWB! I was so disappointed. It was an opportunity lost until we met again in the school lab!

I think that is part of successful engagement with IWB technology. So many opportunities are there for us to utilise on the web, our school networks, prepared resouces on our USB drives and of course - the board's tools and galleries.

I believe that good IWB use is that great mix of skills in both technical and pedagogical. Knowing our boards and knowing how to hyperlink to other documents and weblinks, utilising the school's software and PRS hardware to encourage an interactive classroom does provide a solid foundation to build our teaching skills upon.

Yes Faraday, once teachers get this mix they become so excited with their involvement in education and their students are invited into this efficient and versatile and stimulating environment. Its one of those big YES moments!

[Peter Kent]

Hi Chris and everyone else,

This question is the key, and a fantastic place for this Ning to start.

Part of the controversy around IWBs (revolutionary vs disastrous ) comes from the fact that many (most?) IWB users cannot answer this question and as a consequence spend a lot of their teacing time integrating IWBs poorly. I think others in this ning have mentioned ‘Drill and Kill’ and ‘super mouses’.

All teachers need to be able to identify and articulate the difference between inspired uses of IWB and terrible ones.

However, for me the answer to this question lies outside of IWBs and even outside of technology integration in general, it is fundamental to teaching. In my view excellent teaching today is much the same as excellent teaching 20 years ago, and will still be excellent teaching in 20 years time. My take on the timeless qualities of good teaching are below:
• Good teaching includes building rapport with their students, encouraging and enabling them to be active participants in their learning.
• Good teaching includes making their lessons relevant and interesting to students and does this by including content material that relates to students’ life and interests outside of school.
• Good teaching focuses on intellectual depth rather than shallow fact recall.
• Good teaching encourages students to rise to their potential rather than sink to a teacher’s expectations.

I know that when used well an IWB makes it easier, and increases the capacity, for teachers to practice good teaching. So if I can see the use of the IWB contributing to one or more of the dot points above I know it is being used well. Equally, if the use of an IWB does not contribute to any of these dot points I know that the use is probably making the overall teaching worse.

I am aware that this is quite a big picture answer and somewhat unhelpful at the classroom practice level. But is does set up some more questions that might be helpful:

How can an IWB help a teacher build positive rapport within the classroom?
How can an IWB help a teacher incorporate relevant content within their teaching on a regular basis?
How can an IWB assist teachers avoid a simple focus on fact recall? (note most comercial IWB software activities are focused on fact recall)
How can an IWB assist a teacher in setting high expectations for students?

Answering these questions might be more helpful at the classroom practice level.

Cheers

Peter

[Chris Betcher]

Great questions Peter, thanks for contributing them.

One thing that really came through really strongly as we were doing the research and talking to teachers while writing the book, is that the "interactivity" of interactive whiteboards is often mistakenly perceived as the interactivity of students or teachers coming to the board, dragging objects around or somehow manipulating objects on the board. While this physical interactivity is certainly a useful thing and in many ways an indicator of whether an IWB is being "used well" (ie, not just as an old style projector screen) it missed something very important.

Beyond that though, we found that the concept of interactivity was far more about the intellectual interactivity, not physical interactivity. Teachers using IWBs well were the ones that challenged students to think more deeply about ideas, to engage in spirited debate about concepts, or to defend their ideas in the face of criticism by others. The depth of thinking, and the intellectual quality that come from that thinking, is the real hallmark of great teaching. What great "IWB teachers" seem to be able to do better than most, is to use the inherent abilities of the IWB - the ability to manipulate, sort, match, compare ideas, present points of view using rich multimedia resources, successfully divert lessons into unexpected areas by finding resources on the fly - THESE are the things that IWBs seem to enable far more easily, and the real benefit of the technology is NOT in using it as a technical solution for adding physical interactivity, but rather, in using them as a pedagogical solution to stimulating intellectual activity.

I'm in total agreeance with you Peter. Good teaching is good teaching... it always has been and always will be.

Thanks again for the revised questions.

Chris

[Pam Thompson]

It's good to hear this voiced by someone whose opinion I greatly respect. I have mentioned this to colleagues before but couldn't really justify my opinion. Personally I find it quite difficult to ensure that all students in my class get to experience the physical interactivity of the board, and have often felt that I need to investigate this further. Great to have a place to collaborate. Thanks Chris.

[Peter Kent]

One of the problems with what is and isn't good teaching with an IWB is frankly many of the IWB sellers and the way they market the boards. Of course there are some good IWB vendors from an educational point of view, but there are also some shockers. I propose that we make a rouges gallary of good and bad IWB adverts and try to use our influence (joke) to start building a higher standard of expectations around the use of IWBs.

I will start with two bad and one good example (I have airbrushed away brand names:

This is meant to be a multi-touch board and gosh. Is this the best example of multi-touch they could think of? Total fact recall, no higher order thinking skills required here.

This is the worst I have ever seen. I don't think it needs any futher comment.

To be honest it was not easy to find a good example (not that I tried for that long). But here students are clearly in a position where they could be having a discussing. It also appears that they are manipulating chemical molecules. One way an IWB can promote higher order thinking is to allow students to visualise and explore highly abstract concepts. Traditionally this activity would probably have been done via written chemical equations which most student find hard to visualise and therefore engage with.

I will be interested to see what examples others can find.

Cheers

Peter

[Diane Twentyman]

I have been using a smartboard for 2 years now and have gone through a series of phases with it. At first it was all about making the "pretty" notebooks, about using all the bells and whistles that come with it. It was as though the IWB was just a substitute for the blackboard that I no longer had. After talking to many colleagues this phase was pretty much the same for them and one I feel new users need to go through. I call it the orientation phase.
As I progressed I handed more control to the students in using the board rather than me being in control and the IWB just a resource.,
Now I am trying to fit what I do with the IWB into the NSW Quality Teaching Framework. Does what I am doing with it encourage discussion among my students (Year 4)? Does it require them to use higher order thinking skills? Does it allow scope for creativity? ect.
It is definitely a powerful tool in the classroom where children can access information on websites that are interactive and it is all immediate.
It is great as an organisational resource. I set up my weekly routine on it, linking in appropriate websites, webquests, ect.
I don't think there is any one particular "good" use. I guess it does come down to who is using it.
Teachers who have the ability to motivate their students, teach explicitly and provide a stimulating environment conducive to learning I feel have the traits to use an IWB effectively.
Using an IWB definitely does not automatically ensure effective teaching. I cringe when I think about some of my early attempts at lessons. lol
Thank you Chris for providing this forum for IWB users.

[Pam Thompson]

Hi Diane. I think you're right about the phases teachers will go through when using an IWB. Trudy Sweeney at Flinders University has developed a framework of hte phases of use of an IWB. Our school used this last year as part of our evaluation of how we were using the boards. Teachers need to be able to go through the various stages without feeling they're not using the IWB effectively. The key point is that progress is made.

[Lesleigh Altmann]

I do agree Pam. There was an interesting technology integration matrix from USA that I found (http://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/index.html) and it helped me get my head around the 'walk' before you can 'crawl' before you can 'leap' into utilising the IWB as a great tool. I am sure Chris' new book will have much better support ideas than just this one I found. I always called this process of introducing the IWB into the class room - the 'Implementation Dip'. At first teachers seem to use the IWB hub (board, laptop, speakers etc) as a classroom cinema centre. But then it all starts to happen when teachers start learning the technology to come in line with the expectations of good teaching practice. Teachers start experimenting with the tools of the board, integrating their knowledge of Microsoft skills, then start to confidently interact with the board until the learning environment is transformed into a rich learning environment that engages students in higher order thinking skills. I think it is part of our professional maturity to crawl before we begin to leap. As long as we don't stay in the crawling stage without wanting to mature! Stages are there to progress through and feel good about our accomplishments.

[Chris Betcher]

I agree Diane. I also don't think there is "one particular Good use" for an IWB, in fact when we asked for classroom snapshots from leading IWB teachers for use in the book, there was almost no common thread at all in the actual methods and techniques they applied. We included eight snapshots from eight teachers from different parts of the world and, honestly, they all do amazing things but their method for doing it bears no resemblance to each other at all.

This is where I think we get a bit fixated about IWBs... we all feel that we should be using them "better", but often we aren't all that clear about what "better" is. I think we see the IWB vendor demonstrations and then try to fit the razzle-dazzle IWB features into our own lessons, and sometimes it just isn't needed. What is really needed is to make our kids think a little more by presenting them with interesting problems that cause them to have to defend their positions, justify their arguments or explain their point of view. And I'm convinced that in many cases this can be achieved in a far less obvious way than we often believe.

You've hit the nail on the head when you say that you're trying to use your IWB to fit in with the Quality Teaching Framework (which is really just a formal way of saying "good teaching") is exactly the right approach. Provide intellectual quality in the tasks you ask your kids to do, and make the tasks you create significant and meaningful to the students. If you do that, then you are teaching well. If the IWB can help you do that (and I believe it can), then all the better.

And yes, having an IWB in your classroom won't make your teaching more effective, any more than sitting in a henhouse will make you a chicken. ;-)

[Kelli Murphy]

Chris, I think it would be an easier question to take it from the other side.... "how do you know when you are using it badly?" Funny as that seems, I could give you more examples of this. The more memorable ones are those teachers whose classroom has not moved beyond the PPT with the teacher in front. Kids are still taking notes and haven't moved from their seats in the rows since the bell rang. There is no interactivity from the teacher or for the students.

Those that use it well, I notice that their classrooms are engaged and active. Students are in the front of the room and focus is collaboration. A tool is often easier to install but more difficult to integrate into curriculum. I will cheer when the board becomes less as a reward and more ubiqutuous to the classroom instruction.

[Ian Gay]

One of my big problems with many of the comments is that they are not really looking at the use of IWBs but in fact the use of the software on a computer interacted with via an IWB. Many of the good (and bad) uses of the software could have been controlled by other means, indeed most uses of an IWB that I personally have seen have been by the mouse or keyboard of the computer itself.

Having been teaching for many years with most of the early years being at the blackboard and seeing the problems that entailed (vision, control, access) I personally prefer a model of using the computer and its software by controlling it from the side or back. This can be done quite readily by wireless keyboard, mouse or tablet and can be shared readily with students. Of course this means then that an IWB is used purely as an expensive screen; it is the use of the software and computer displayed by the data projector that we are really evaluating.

I find it interesting that the whole issue has been labeled as the IWB debate when if we look at it, what is actually necessary?
Data projector? yes...
Screen? probably
Computer? yes...
Software? yes .....
IWB? no.... other ways of controlling the computer are available.

I am not actually against IWBs (it might seem like it) but I am against all the hype, evangelism etc about them. For my school we could have a data projector and screen installed with speakers, wireless keyboard/mouse in at least 3 rooms for the cost of one similar IWB setup. Foe me that is a no-brainer.