From my experiences with IWB’s in the secondary school I currently work in as IT Administrator, the IWB’s are rarely used for their interactive components, with most being used as digital projector screens or not at all. With our recent change to Macbooks, we decided not to install the SMART software onto these devices, partly because the IWB’s were not used by teachers so the software wasn’t required; and also because the licensing costs for the software had changed from a perpetual license to an annual subscription fee, and it was going to cost $10,000+ to license the software for all our teachers, which was not something we were prepared to even consider paying.
I agree with the outcomes found by Jan Lacina in her essay (Lacina, 2009), were she found “IWBs are an expensive form of technology–and there is no strong scientific research showing that students who are instructed by a teacher using an IWB have higher achievement.” as this reflects what I’ve seen for the last 8 years in my job. Many teachers initially were willing to give IWB’s a go, but found the extra demand on their time to create interactive lessons, along with software that wasn’t 100% reliable and limited class time, meant many teachers concluded it was not worth the time, especially when they weren’t seeing any changes in students learning outcomes.
Most teachers agreed the interactive components would probably have worked better in a primary school environment where the teacher has the same class all day, but the novelty factor of the IWB’s didn’t last long with secondary students, and some teachers found their classes became quite disrupted with students needing to come up to the board to “interact” before going back to their seat. As the board only allowed for 1 person to “interact” with it at a time, it didn’t work well when you had large classes of 30 students. This consensus was also reflected by Lacina in her essay “Teachers who teach large classes may want to reconsider using only whole-class instruction, since much instructional time is wasted as students interact one-on-one with the board.”
The main KLAs who did find the IWBs slightly useful were Creative Arts, LOTE and Science, but agreed the same outcome could be achieved by using a digital projector and whiteboard. An example is Visual Arts, where a painting could be projected onto the IWB and the teacher can then highlight certain techniques and styles within the painting using the IWB. However this could also be achieved for significantly less cost by using a whiteboard instead of the IWB, plus the whiteboard can be used on any device and didn’t need to have hardware specific software installed to be able to be used.
The study by Winzenried, A., Dalgarno, B., & Tinkler, J. (2010), also furthers to validate my opinion of IWBs with many of the teachers studied only using the IWBs for projecting Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Internet site and videos, all of which could have been done with just a digital projector and no IWB, saving the school and teacher, both time and money.
As Lacina said in her concluding sentence “What may be more important for students are teachers who initiate inquiry-based learning classrooms, and schools that provide smaller class sizes to allow more individualised interaction between teachers and students.”(Lacina, 2009). I agree with this as I feel the school’s limited time, resources and money could be better spent, this has since been the school’s position with no IWBs installed in our recent classroom refurbishments. So far no complaints from teachers about missing their IWB…
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