Are we just being seduced by novelty again? It’s a thrill to touch the board and have it respond like a mouse. It’s magical, impressive... “stand back and give me room everyone…”

An advantage of not using the whiteboard as the method of input is the teacher not getting in the way of the image and being able to see whole screen at once. There is also no feature of an interactive whiteboard that can’t really be duplicated by other means. That might be tough on interactive whiteboard manufacturers but it is learning that matters.

Creating such things is time consuming. It’s interesting that you don't see many people using the old OHPs as they ought to be either. Why? because it takes time and effort to learn to work with them properly and ages to prepare good overlays etc. 

But if that is the comparison, it’s much quicker to produce professional looking displays using the computer, and increasingly in Primary, teachers are creating interactive displays through clip art simply grabbed from the internet.

In one such class, the teacher created a maths lesson on money in 15 minutes by searching for clip art on RM’s Pathways, copying and pasting it into the whiteboard screen, and duplicating the coins to create a pile of change. Then in the lesson they drew a circle on the board and asked the children to come and drag a given amount of money into it.

Few seem to have considered the value of the collaborative way of working with the boards by having a small group discussing and dragging objects about in a brainstorming session or working through a geometry or graphing exercise for example. With suitable software and the right type of board this could be highly motivational with the "audience" i.e. the pupils not at the front, still finding it stimulating despite pupils getting in the way.

Here are some direct quotes from newsgroups at the end of long discussions about whether whiteboards were really necessary and whether they simply gave extra life to a stale teaching method that should be phased out. (-Ed.)

Smartboards are expensive whatever the size; big ones are VERY expensive - so it's hard for schools to equip all classrooms, and you get some inter-subject discrimination. Most of what you use them for can be done with other input devices - it's the projector that's the key. Indeed, Promethean have let the cat out of the bag by selling a tablet onto which chidren write directly (they don't need to touch the board...so why pay for all that touch-sensitivity?).

Smartboards in use may be great in schools where all teachers and pupils are able-bodied people of uniform height. But using touch-sensitive surfaces is an expensive and unnecessarily complex way of getting information into a system, where other input devices are available. For example, the mouse (which costs rather less). Or a scanner - allied to the distributed power of a class of children with pencil crayons very demotic, and produces seriously excellent work in little time). This also allows more scope for the mavericks, who find whole-class teaching too hard or too easy.

More seriously, does anyone know what the effect is of making learning increasingly rely on visual representations of information? Ever been bored or patronized on a training day by a colleague's PowerPoint slideshow (usually characterized by slick but pointless transition FX)? I have. We shouldn't be dazzled by the trinkets.

A project in Birmingham has installed Promethean Interactive Whiteboards in 29 nurseries during the past five months. The boards have been installed at working height for the children. The children are using the whiteboards to access activities and by children and adults working together in group learning/teaching sessions.

The initial feedback from schools involved in the project suggests that the boards are having a profound effect in a number of ways. Firstly, children who were not freely choosing to use computers are joining in with activities on the Whiteboards. They are able to explore the activity without focusing on using the mouse. Once they are familiar with the activity and are excited by it they are transferring their knowledge to interact with the same activities on a computer. This means that the children are focused on the activity, not on controlling a mouse.

Staff have noted that the children using the Interactive Whiteboards are communicating more with their peers during an activity. At a computer one or two children can work together, often using "turn taking" language. With an Interactive Whiteboard, groups of children are working together collaboratively. They are sharing the task and discussing what they can see on the screen, what happens next, what they have to do and often relating this back to their own life/experiences.

Paula Stallard
ICT Consultant for Early Years
EdIT, Birmingham

“I think that the extended use of the whiteboard is a reflection of ICT Capability of the school (or institution) and / or the teacher. But is this a technology too far? Is it a lick and a promise that will not deliver? No! ...and emphatically so in my opinion. It is a current technology that is still being developed and one that allows pupils to interact and to be involved in teaching as well as learning. It is a device that allows independent learning and small groupwork and it allows teachers to begin to develop a new methodology.

I can only respond from my experience with observing the DfES' Y7 maths project (MathsAlive) this year. Up to then I had been rather sceptical about what I had seen demonstrated.. The project has had 20 Year 7 maths classes and their teachers working on a regular basis with whiteboards (Smartboards) for whole class activities involving the interaction of teachers and students. The students are still fairly fresh from primary schools and very much like to participate actively in lessons. The teachers are volunteers who are taking on a whole load of new ideas, not just the use of the technology, but also in classroom organisation, planning and of course in adapting to the KS3 maths framework.

The project's materials include files written in a new version of RM's Easiteach (adapted for secondary school mathematics) which are designed for whole class interactive teaching. As teachers, and students, have become more familiar with this form of "electronic blackboard" they have started to use it with their own materials or just as a "bare board"…

As part of the project, all schools have received site licences for dynamic geometry software (the Geometer's Sketchpad) and make use of files written in Sketchpad on the whiteboards for whole class work. Here the analog nature of the Smartboard has been particularly attractive as students can come up and drag points around with their fingers - which they describe as "being in touch with the mathematics". This approach to geometry in particular has been a revelation.

A large number of mathematical games and simulations have been produced for the project (by 3T) and these have also proved very effective when used in whole-class mode on the whiteboards. The project has been extensively evaluated (c 80 field visits in 2 terms) and one of the major findings has been the positive effect on students' attitude to the subject - and the interactions with the electronic whiteboards have clearly had a major impact. So here at least is one (very exciting) example of "whiteboards being used as a child centred learning tool that did anything more than any presentation package".

A couple of observations - over the last three years or so I have seen several whiteboard demonstrations at exhibitions, and every time the material being presented on the board has been pitched at KS4 or beyond; and yet, as some contributors have noted, some of the most imaginative uses of the technology have been related to whole-class teaching in the NLS and NNS at primary level. Could this have something to do with manufacturers' perceptions about funding levels, or is it yet another example of that ubiquitous fallacy that older pupils are more in need of newer technologies?

In my view the IW is a superb vehicle for the whole-class bits of the NLS and NNS, but the definitive pieces of generic software for this have yet to be written. Easiteach is a start, but perhaps RM need to think more carefully about how users can provide
materials for it. The missing bit for literacy is the super-word processor that allows you to tag all the adverbs, revisit all the alterations you made to a sentence, etc. etc. (I have a lengthy wish-list somewhere). Does anyone know if anyone is working on anything like this?

In a few years, when we've really cracked the large flat screen, data projectors will look primitive, but I would hope that the
genuinely interactive teaching that IW enables will be flourishing.

Dr Bob Fox, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education & Psychology,
University College Worcester,

I do believe that the one key point to the success of whiteboards as a teaching medium, however they are actually used, is that teachers actually PLAN THEIR WHITEBOARD LESSONS to the last second. Lessons are carefully structured, well resourced (not the next chapter from the textbook) and the whiteboard/PowerPoint acts as an effective lesson management system. I have had the pleasure of watching a number of IW based lessons now, a few have had innovative elements, most are just very good teaching, ably assisted by the technology, but very thoroughly planned. More power to its elbow I say, the pupils I've watched have had a very good deal and have learned what they were supposed to learn.

In my experience, the electronic whiteboard, or simply a data projector, can be used very effectively in conjunction with, for example, presentation software to explain complex concepts. The teacher can take pupils through a process step by step, stimulating questions and discussion from them and asking them to predict consequences and results. The interaction amongst pupils and between pupils and the teacher facilitated by the steps shown on screen can result in highly effective whole class teaching. The step by step sequencing achieved through, for example, Powerpoint, is impossible to achieve on an ordinary whiteboard, and far more difficult to manage on an OHP. The interactivity offered by the electronic whiteboard means that the teacher is not tied to the laptop in order to operate it, and that activities can be devised to involve individuals or groups of pupils. Using a data projector with or without an electronic whiteboard also means that many useful items of software, for example, text manipulation tools, can be used with students without the need for the teacher to book an ICT suite.

The ICT suite environment is often not ideally suited to teaching and learning, and in any case the facilities might not be needed for the whole of the lesson. The use of a data projector allows for greater flexibility in the use of ICT in the classroom and is therefore more likely to lend itself to true integration of ICT into teaching and learning.

The clarity and quality of materials presented to students using a data projector is far superior to that of materials written on a blackboard, whiteboard or using an OHP. The ability to manipulate and change whatever information is being presented is also far easier.

I don't think the appreciation of electronic whiteboards is a matter of teachers feeling in control, nor is it an electronic version of chalk and talk. When used appropriately it promotes the active involvement of pupils in class discussion and in their own learning. It is simply the recognition that for certain situations good whole class teaching is appropriate and that a data projector / electronic whiteboard is a highly effective way of delivering it.

I was initially sceptical about the technology. However, my own experience of using a whiteboard for teacher training has on the whole been positive. They enable you to be more in touch, literally and metaphorically, with the content of what you are teaching. (When using a projector on its own, I sometimes feel like I'm providing a sort of disembodied voiceover to images on the other side of the room - sounds and pictures in opposition, rather than complementing each other - I've noticed that very experienced users of data projectors, like Jamie Mackenzie who spoke at this year's NAACE conference, often walk off down the side of the room to get your attention away from the images, and onto the content of what they are saying.)

I recently had the privilege of visiting a local authority which is at the forefront of developing broadband services to its

SMART boards are indeed expensive however this fact does not detract from their usefulness to the teacher. Nor as they primarily expected to be used as an input device. They are a teaching aid and believe it or not a great deal of teaching is still delivered for at least part of the lesson from the front of the class to a large group of pupils sat following the lesson. As to something these boards do better using other means - anyone who has played a video clip, stopped the action with the tap of a finger, annotated the movie using the pens provided, snap shot the screen, continue the video clip, stop, annotate and snap shot some more then used the series of snap shots to remind the class of the main teaching points at the end of the video will testify to the great potential of these boards as a teaching tool. As far as I can see this type of powerful teaching technique is unique to this technology. There is no need to believe that this type of teaching will come to dominate the life of the learner, it simply improves the teacher centred learning that has traditionally been done via talk and chalk techniques of the past.

“It strikes me that the importance of whiteboards is that they are one of the first pieces of IT technology which are "owned" by the teacher as opposed to the learner - good teachers of course will share it with their pupils - it is this ownership and place at the heart of teaching (as opposed to learning) which excites teachers - and rightly so in my view.”