IWBs: 2D in a 3D World

During my years as a teacher, I never had a Promethian or a SMART Board, and if presented the choice today, I would decline the offer.  Interactive whiteboards were a fine technology before the introduction of smart phones and tablets in our world and they may continue to hold a place in the business word, but in education they are two-dimensional surfaces with limited options for use.  If schools want to invest money and  integrate technology into the classroom, the IWB is a weak option in a time when tools fulfilling many options are readily available.  As educators we need too look for multi-dimensional tools to fulfill many functions, enabling creativity, inquiry, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration without boundaries of time or space, and the IWB does not fulfill that requirement.

As the article “Interactive Whiteboards: Creating Higher-Level, Technological Thinkers?” clearly concludes, no, IWBs are not creating higher-level technological thinkers, and student engagement is short-lived.  IWBs seem to be one of the quick-fix gimmicks schools districts across the country are adapting in order to sell themselves as technology-rich learning environments.  The Fort Worth Independent School district’s initiative to install 5,000 interactive whiteboards across the district in two years is very near-sighted.  As Larry Cuban suggests, teachers are often not prepared to implement such technology that has landed in their classrooms.  Often IWBs are used as expensive screens or white boards because teachers feel they lack the training needed to fully integrate them.  Another weakness, J. Lacina points out, is often students become “spectators”, watching a teacher interact with the boards, continuing the tradition of the teacher-centered classroom.

My former school district decided to jump on the iPad bandwagon and is implementing a 1:1 initiative, though this decision was made with no substantiated research to back the decision, echoing the decision made my FWISD. Despite the plethora of problems this adoption entails, I feel more hope for this technology because the tool has multiple functions.  Because iPads have the capability to morph into countless tools, it is a better investment option.  With downloadable applications, many of which are free, an iPad can become an interactive whiteboard with many functions not previously available on IWBs and they can become many tools beyond IWBs.

With apps like Doceri (free), Prezi (free), and Splashtop ($19.99), learning can become student-centered and very portable.  Yes, teachers can make presentations and demonstrations with these apps, then share them via email or the web, but more importantly students can use these tools to show their learning and share their understanding with others.  Doceri and Splashtop, along with apps like Educreations (free), ShowMe (free), and ScreenChomp (free), all enable variations of interacting with  a surface, while simultaneously recording what is happening on the screen, accompanied by sound.  A student could complete a math problem while thinking aloud through the process and send the video and audio to a classmate or teacher to demonstrate learning or to help others.  In fact, this type of tool allows students to have an authentic audience, motivating a higher level of performance.

Prezi (free) is an example of the technology moving beyond whiteboard functioning.  A presentation made with Prezi changes the dimension of the content, having multiple boards on one virtual plane for interaction.  Users glide from slide-to-slide, interacting with text, video, images, and sound.  Students creating content in Prezi and interactive whiteboard apps are using higher-order thinking skills than those using a traditional IWB.  They contribute better to inquiry-based classrooms in which students must learn how to “analyze, interpret, and compose using varied texts”, as Lacinda describes.

As Lacinda points out, pedagogy needs to be at the forefront of educators’ minds.  The SAMR model of integration is something I believe in strongly.  

We need to move students from substitution to transformation.  IWBs are on the substitution level, while apps like Prezi, ScreenChomp, ShowMe, and Educreations show up on the transformation level because they enable tasks that were not possible before and allow for higher levels of creativity.  Notice this means that they also correspond to the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, as shown in the model below.

 

When it comes to technology in the classroom, it is important to chose that which will serve the greatest function and the highest order of thinking.  If we do not choose accordingly and wildly jump on tech bandwagons without direction, we are putting the cart before the horse and driving education in the wrong direction.