Cinderella technology?

Image by Glamhag on Flickr

Large screen touch displays seem to be the 'Cinderella technology' of education. In the popular folk tale, Cinderella is described on Wikipedia as: "... one whose attributes were unrecognised, or one who unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect." 

Initially, the most common large screen display, known as the  interactive whiteboard (IWB) - was viewed with great promise, but over time, due to misuse, lack of training or knowledge (and in some cases, neglect), interactive whiteboards appear to have been sidelined in some schools.

Many good uses of the IWB are reported in the literature, and many schools have harnessed its potential to transform aspects of teaching and learning. And yet, there are also many who have missed the opportunity to leverage the power and potential of IWBs in the classroom. The latter seem not to have made connections between the affordances of the IWB and authentic, situated pedagogy.

Successfully introducing new technologies into complex environments can be a great challenge. Teachers are incredibly busy, have increasingly difficult workloads to contend with, and have little time to spend experimenting with new ideas. In service training days are usually spent catching up with the latest rules, government edicts and preparation for school inspections. If there is little or no time to try out new ideas, teachers will not feel comfortable with tools such as interactive whiteboards.

There is now a huge selection of IWBs and other touchscreen devices available for schools. However, where they have been deployed in education, IWBs have sometimes been used in a limited or superficial manner, almost as an afterthought. In some cases they have been used as a substitute for older technologies such as chalkboards and projection screens. In short, one of the significant issues around the use of IWBs has been a lack of transfer of the tool into effective pedagogy.

So, how can educators tap into the powerful affordances of the interactive whiteboard? What can teachers do to bring the interactive touch surface from out of the shadows? Watch out for my next post in which I will present six important points educators should consider, should they wish to exploit the tremendous potential of the interactive whiteboard.


Cinderella technology? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.