Interactive White Boards – Just an expensive Toy???
I’m very interested that out of the long list of literacture in Designing Learning for a Digital Generation there’s no articles regarding the interactive white board…
During my practicum I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to be in a classroom with an interactive white board. At first I was so daunted by the fact that I’d need to learn the white board in order to be able to teach the class but got straight into learning how the software worked (I used Promethean’s amazing learning resources) and really enjoyed the challenge of learning to teach using this amazing technology. Lesson preparation took quite a while at first but got easier as I learned the technology. Merrett and Edwards agree that preparation became easier with practice.
Doing the research into interactive white boards I found some very positive and some negative view points. One such comment that caught my eye was from Blanton (2008) who says “If using the technology and designing tasks to show off that technology takes precedence over a pedagogical emphasis on enhancing student learning, then all you have is an expensive toy.” I found in prac that a lot of the time I was not focusing on “teaching” the students how to do mathematics, I was thinking about the “technology” and how I could make the technology work for me. My practicum teacher was also having the same difficulties learning how the interactive white board worked and forgot to get through the content required.
Scheweder has a list of resources I found very helpful when using the interactive white board that I would definately recommend looking at.
I believe that technology when used to complement teaching styles and strategies can make the lesson more motivating for students and help them enjoy mathematics more but you need to make sure that you are still teaching the content to the students and not just designing a pretty lesson.
Question for other prac teachers; Has anyone else had a similar situation and if so, how did you overcome it?
Photo from joedale.typepad.com
October 11th, 2008 at 3:58 am
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