Going to the wall

In a previous post entitled Learning spaces of the third kind I outlined a project to establish an experimental learning space. It's called the eXSpace and will be a showcase for a range of new and emerging technologies, a place to study new pedagogies and a sandpit to try out new ideas and methods.

At Plymouth Institute of Education we have been using a number of classroom technologies, but perhaps one of the most misunderstood is the SMART Interactive Whiteboard. Every one of our major classrooms had one installed when our new building was commissioned several years ago. Yet with only a few exceptions, the Smart boards have been used as little more than projection screens and surfaces for writing on. In effect, the boards have been used as substitutes for the old dry wipe boards and projection screens. Patently, interactive whiteboards can be used for so much more.

They come in several sizes, but one of the universal affordances of SMARTboards is their interactive touch surface. You can tap them, scroll them, click them, write on them, wipe them. Often, SMARTboards are a centre piece of the classroom, and can so easily become just another presentational tool for the teacher. However, due to their interactive touch screen, they can also be used extensively by students. The caveat here, is that if you invite your students to use the SMARTboard, you should first decide on what particular pedagogy you are applying. Is it collaborative, competitive, or solo engagement with content?

I have witnessed many innovative uses of SMARTboards over the last few years. Perhaps one of the most productive I observed recently was during a year 2 class lesson on mathematics. The children were learning about number bonds, so the teacher organised the children around small tables into groups of four. They were given paper handouts with target numbers. They then had to work out from the screen, which numbers came together to make the target numbers. As the 'game' progressed, each table was invited to send a member from their group to drag two numbers together on the SMARTboard to achieve the target number. Chaos ensued as the children competed to see who could get the most number bonds correct. It's hard to remember seeing a more excited and engaged group of children in a maths lesson. It really was 'mental' arithmetic!

Such 'click and drag' activities are very engaging, and can involve the entire class of children. Other applications of SMARTboards may not involve all children directly interacting with the board but can be just as engaging. Consider using games and quizzes. This is not hard to achieve through some motivational interactive design, such as clickable objects, animations, countdowns or timed text reveals. Children learn through games because they are being challenged to recall what they have already learnt, but can also learn from the answers of their peers. The collaborative/competitive aspects of team games can also be highly motivational.

Finally, teachers should consider brainstorming as a method of engaging students. Using the SMARTboard as a tool to capture children's ideas during a discussion or problem solving exercise is the first phase. Categorising or grouping ideas into separate boxes by dragging text and repositioning it can help children to

In my next post I'm featuring some of the new SMART technologies, connected education experiences and learning suite software we will be using in the new eXSpace.

Image source: Pixabay


Going to the wall by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.