As a high-end technological instructional tool, the interactive whiteboard (IWB) can now be found in most of the UK schools. Having experienced it in the ICT in ELT classes this year, I want to write down some of my feelings about this "seemingly" powerful tool which has not yet been popularized in my home country.
Admittedly, IWBs did capture my attention immediately when I first saw the teacher use it to flip through her PowerPoint slides just like performing magic. "It is amazing, absolutely splendid!"- I felt in my heart. Like a huge iPad, it allows users to touch, click or drag the items on the screen with their fingers or an IWB pen. Better still, notes can be handwritten on the board, which can then be transformed into a PDF file or text and be saved and sent to the students. However, there were some moments when handwriting could not be recognized by this advanced board and the teacher had to give up and returned to use the mouse and the keyboard. I remembered once the teacher asked each of us to come up and choose an option for a question; unfortunately, the IWB could not recognize our touch and it turned out to be the teacher clicking on it for us using the mouse! In terms of the interaction from this aspect, the main interaction I can see is that between the teacher and the whiteboard. I can hardly find any interaction between students.
In terms of the classroom activities or games with this smart board, most of them (I have experienced in the class) share the following features: students come up to the board to click a relevant icon or drag something like a word or a picture to a certain place (where the answer may be) as part of the group work; or each group has a representative to do a similar action for the whole group. When one of the class members go up to the board to finish his part, other members just sit in their seats watching that person doing his bit and then another person finishing another bit. Although I was amazed at how these normal activities can be done in such a gorgeous way by means of the technology, gradually I got a bit bored of it, beginning to consider "what's the point of doing this""is it a waste of time seeing other people 'interacting' with the whiteboard while the rest of us just sitting quietly""has the students' language ability been improved by doing this" and so on. Perhaps for young learners, it will be more beneficial as it can cultivate their hands-on ability as well as for kinaesthetic learners who like to move and touch a lot while learning.
There is no doubt that IWBs can be used in other better ways which may achieve "real" interactions. But that requires the teacher to have a high skill of using it and they may need to spend much more time in the preparation stage compared to using a normal whiteboard (yet the added interactive effects with an IWB are unknown). Having said that, there are still many useful points of an IWB, such as in the way the teacher uses the PowerPoint which can achieve some flash effects as well as in accessing materials more easily, even though they seem to have little to do with interactivity.
As far as in the learning context of my home country (China), from my own experience, quite many Chinese students prefer sitting still listening to the teacher's talk to moving a lot. Also, given the high price of an IWB, it may be difficult for it to become a popular tool in the next few years in the ELT classroom in China, even in its developed areas.
Great Blog Ayleen. I really enjoyed your critical review and I do share most of your concerns. Interactivity seems to be a real issue when using IWB's. However, as you correctly noted it seems that most schools (in the UK for the time being) tend to endorse such practices which means that it is up to us to try and find some ways to integrate some more ICT tools when using IWB's that promote interactivity and seem to bypass the "head-up" approach that the latter admittedly promotes.So. I guess, in the end it is a question of whether we choose to shy away from technology such as IWB's or try and improve it to meet our needs.
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