Category Archive

I didn’t think I’d actually see it.

I drove past a public primary school yesterday, only to see the message board out the front read:

INTERACTIVE
WHITEBOARDS K-6

Clearly this school sees it as its selling point.  I suppose there were schools that marketed themselves on the fact they had computers, or later, how many they had.  Some now even push that they have 1 to 1 laptop programs.

I suppose this also says something for the growth of the tool in Australia over the last few years.  It now looks like a boat that at least some schools don’t want to miss.

Now we can almost boast the same claim (I bet the school in question didn’t have 25 classes to install them in to!), but I’d rather boast about the learning that is achieved using them as a tool.

Not so easy to put up on the message sign, though.  I think we’ll stick with “Students Return Tuesday 14 October”.

Our staff has a briefing every Tuesday morning, and this morning I considered it timely to start briefing teachers on the installation of their interactive whiteboards (they’re going into 4 grades, projectors only in 1 for now, the rest already have them); especially given that installation will start next week.

The briefing prompted a question on how high up the wall we install our IWBs.  Listening to the experiences of other schools further along this road than ourselves, we’ve based installation heights on how high the children in the specific grades can reach.  There was some conjecture this morning that this can be too low for the teachers to use effectively.  I have seen when IWBs are too high and steps and platforms have had to be built so students can reach - something which can be potentially dangerous, in my opinion.

I, being the glutton for punishment that I am, decided to express my own opinion through a potential teachable moment, responding with the question of “who are we installing the board for?”

Now I have no doubt that teachers can and do use the IWB.  I disagree with the notion that it should be completely built and installed to suit them.  In my opinion, it’s really not any different to why we put computers in classrooms - for the students to use.

The way I see it, putting the IWB up at “teacher height” (remembering that some primary teachers aren’t much taller than their senior students anyway) encourages a teaching style that is the “chalk and talk” of the 21st Century.  As for adapting for teachers when they do legitimately need to use it, there are several customisations within software nowadays (including the IWB software) that will put things in easy reach for teachers as well as students, including the Start Menu in Windows.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of some of my colleagues beginning to rethink how they teach and how their students learn in the 21st Century.

Today I’ve arrived in Melbourne for the 2008 Interactive Whiteboard Conference at Firbank Grammar School in Brighton, Melbourne.  It was a fairly last-minute decision to come, along with two other colleagues from my school; a decision helped by the recent increase we now have planned to our IWB rollout for 2008.

For me, this is my 2nd IWB conference, the first being two years ago at Castle Hill when we knew little of the tool and were looking forward to installing our first one in the library.  I’ve now worked with an IWB for about a year.

The hope for myself then, is that I can take myself further and go away with ideas to use the IWB to encourage even deeper and more effective learning in my classroom, rather than get the starters (although that’s where my colleagues are at, and we’re taking some different workshops accordingly).

I also hope that this conference is also about more than just the board.  Castle Hill was great two years ago because it had a broad spectrum of content that looked at a range of applications of technology in the classroom.  It was in a workshop led by John Pearce at that conference that I signed up to Edublogs and started up what is now Learning Curve (it didn’t have such a catchy title then; which means you’re now thinking “good grief, what on earth was it?  Surely it couldn’t have been worse!”).  I was introduced to blogs, wikis and podcasts - things I have used since and seen the difference they’ve made in the classroom.

Finally, I hope I can continue to stregthen existing, and make some new connections out of this experience.  I’ve already met up with colleagues I was introduced to at Castle Hill, and hope to meet some more people sharing the same journey.  The networks are what really helps us as professionals in feeling supported, encouraged and motivated; not to mention broadening and extending our own learning.

After the start we’ve made with our simple Maths task this week (see the previous post), we drew more people into the net today.

One of our teachers’ aides, supporting children with their Maths lesson in my class today had her first experience with an interactive whiteboard.  A simple demonstration from me to the students (and her) reminding them what to do, and I left her to it; she kept them on task and was able to set the students back on track if they clicked the wrong button or couldn’t work out what had gone wrong.  Another exciting step forward, and a little more professional development for our fantastic staff.

Well, today I had some more success, despite the multiple interruptions to the usual classroom routine over the past seven days (a third of the day gone three times isn’t always easy to work through).

The simple task involved using the Activstudio software that came with our interactive whiteboard to drop shapes onto the flipchart pages and use the line tools to mark the lines of symmetry.  Some other features of the software also got tested by the students - the bucket fill was used on shapes and backgrounds.   I intended in a way to be a simple diagnostic assessment to see if children could already identify axes of symmetry and how much work would be needed, if any (the recent interruptions have meant there’s less time to properly address our learning in 2D space).

So one maths group got the task done, and quite well.  Yet the mind was still ticking.  “Let’s get this up on the blog”, I thought.  “There must be some kind of export function.”  Sure enough, I found I could export the flipcharts to flash.  A bit more fiddling (needed to get a host for the flash files as they won’t upload to learnerblogs), and we’ve embedded the students’ work into posts on our class blog (post 1, post 2).

So, what have we achieved today?

• We’ve integrated technology into our mathematics lesson
• My students have used our interactive whiteboard for learning
• We have work samples
• We’ve been able to assess what the children know about axes of symmetry
• Our parents can see what their children can do - simple reporting in less than 24 hours!

Now tomorrow, I’ll have to get some of the children to visit the principal to share their work with him and how they’ve used our new interactive whiteboard.  He’s just going to love it!