[Yr7-10it] Tools for Interactivity (Was: Missed the boat?)

[ken price]

Good points,

One other benefit, which is seldom the main reason given for adopting IWBs,
is that teachers who are reluctant users of ICT in the classroom see the IWB
as a whiteboard (with which they are comfortable) and not a computer (with
which they are not)

In many IWB installations everything is fixed in place so they have less of
the "what plugs in where" obstacles to ICT use. The environment is very
similar to a traditional classroom - this familiarity avoids what some
teachers see as a need to radically change in the way they work.

One particular example that springs to mind was the meeting room of a group
of educational administrators in Victoria, where the computer was
intentionally hidden so that the staff weren't aware that this was a
computer-based environment (I guess it must have been set running by someone
else). The staff there reported that this worked very well in getting
reluctant adopters to take on the technology. Eventually they were using
the general computer aspect of the board, yet past attempts to use ICT had
not been successful.

Another example was seeing a group of ICT-averse teachers use Google Earth
on an IWB. The physical size of the image and the ability to point to places
on it (as one does with a normal map) and have things happen was enough
motivation for some teachers to subsequently investigate the use of Google
Earth on classroom desktops. This was effective, whereas all past attempts
at professional learning with ICT had little impact on that cohort.
Frustrating, but a reality for a small number of teachers.

In the UK (and in some tertiary institutions here) the mimicing of
traditional environments with IWBs has been taken further with the use of
lecterns where the control functions are installed. So a teacher transported
through time from the 1950s might feel at home :-)

The effects here are not simply Hawthorne effects, though there will be of
course some component of that sort. The mechanism is one of providing slow
change by using tools that initially match the environment with which users
are comfortable, then helping them make better use of the additional
features.

So perhaps there is another function of IWBs -  "trainer wheels"
for reluctant users? Or in Roland's terms. a way to help them upgrade to
version 1.0 ... or maybe version 0.9 beta?  ;-)

Ken
TASITE Tasmania

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Roland Gesthuizen <rgesthuizen at gmail.com>wrote:


> <snip>
>
> Any IWB initial positive gain that is observed probably comes from the Hawthorne
> effect <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect>. After spending all
> that money, is anybody going to be brave enough to claim only an incremental
> benefit?
>
> For now I see that it is just a cool tool that we can use to teach well
> some of the time but will is not guaranteed to automatically upgrade
> teachers to version 2.0
>
> Regards Roland
>
>
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