It’s all very well reading about the myriad possibilities that an interactive whiteboard can bring, but when one is suddenly erected in place of the antique blackboard, it’s a bit of a shock. Confronted with this expensive piece of kit, I suddenly felt like a caged primate in a zoo, scratching away and pressing random things in the hope I’d be rewarded with even the smallest of responses.
I brought it on myself though. Each department was to get at least one whiteboard, and after three sulky
years of “it’s not fair” utterances, and the fact that everyone else in my department is still slightly
startled by new-fangled phenomenon of computers, mine was to be the nominated classroom. Along with the
hardware came the expectation that I would now produce some fantastic resources for the whole department to
use, and update our schemes of work accordingly. It took me three days to learn how to switch the thing on.
It took less time for the board to be written on in normal whiteboard pen by a peripatetic teacher.
So far my classes have enjoyed the film-watching possibilities that this piece of kit brings. No more cruddy flickering videos on a small screened TV for us! Now we have cinema-sized viewing of informative DVDs, except that most of our visual resources are still on video, and now we’ve got this monstrous whiteboard there will be no more money for such luxuries as software to use with it! I have instead been discovering how educational “The Simpsons” can be, using my own stock of DVDs for teaching points, just so that I can be seen to be using this expensive board.
I’ve also been raiding the internet for the resources that other teachers kindly post up there for us all to use, although these inevitably contain spelling mistakes or other errors that I don’t have the technical know-how to correct before using.
And there are other problems too. So far, two children have to leave the room when I’m using the board;
one has epilepsy and although he has medication he doesn’t want to risk having a fit, and another claims to get
severe headaches. This means I have to have the foresight and time to prepare paper-based resources before the
lesson starts. And sometimes this isn’t possible if something spontaneous happens, like the class not
understanding what something is or where in the world something is, and I want to show them a picture of it
from the internet to enlighten them. I can’t anticipate every misunderstanding. Then there’s the sun shining
through the gaps in the blinds, bouncing off the board and making it impossible to see what is being projected
there. Or the times when the school’s network has toppled over, leaving me with no board to write on, let alone
show anything fancy on.
I’m just waiting now for the rest of my department to wise up to the fact that I can show DVDs in attention-grabbing hugeness and start badgering me for room swaps, meaning that my classes and I have to traipse elsewhere for lessons, dragging our battered old books along with us.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful that we’ve been dragged into the 21st century at last. And the potential for this piece of hardware is fantastic. I just have two wishes: firstly that someone would show me how to do what I’d like to do on the whiteboard, and secondly, that we still had money to buy up-to-date text books rather than sacrificing their budget for one piece of kit.
added 12/3/06
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