Straight from the chalkface - test-driving the interactive whiteboard

Miranda Hamilton - Bell International,Cambridge, UK

[ Editorial note: this article was first published in an IATEFL SIG publication, and resumes what Miranda told a packed room at the IATEFL Conference in 2004 in Liverpool. Our thanks to the IATEFL Sig for permission to re-publish]

We have a new technological species in our midst. Just when you thought it was safe to crawl out from under your spread sheet, the techies have done it again.

We now have the Interactive Whiteboard.

You have no doubt heard of it whispered about in hallowed tones by those in the know. You may well have heard it discussed keenly by willing colleagues with their technological antennae close to the ground. You nod sagely as they tell you about this marvellous new creature that can replace: laptops, portable data projectors, Power point, Word and any multimedia programme you care to mention, it can be connected up to the internet…. and yet somehow it's also a regular whiteboard. Not possible, can't be done, what and why? I know, that's what I thought too.

You may be one of the lucky ones who have had a chance to fire the beast up, and take a turn around the classroom with one, clinging on for grim death, groping for the old board rubber, and trying hopelessly to rub out your electronic words by hand.

Call me old fashioned, but somehow I could not quite get my tired old brain around this one. I've read the promotional literature and I've heard the talk about them, I've scoured the internet to find out more, and I've quizzed my kids about them. Conceptually I have been completely baffled by what the Interactive Whiteboard promised.

And then this summer I got my first sighting. We have had an Interactive Whiteboard installed at school. Initially we stepped carefully around it, not quite sure of what the great white technological hope could deliver, fearful that this could be the interactive white elephant. No one was quite sure what to do, or how to handle it. Clearly we had to get to know each other.

Three weeks in and I was smitten, and so were the students. Going back to the old whiteboard is like going back to writing a letter by hand! My IWB can do so many things for me, that pen and ink can't do, and I am only going up into third gear. Who knows what fifth will promise. I have yet to master all the options available to me

Let's get back to basics.

Questions and answers

In a nutshell what is the IWB?
- It's a whiteboard that is a huge computer screen. Your PC is connected to this whiteboard.
- Whatever you have on your PC will beam directly up to the whiteboard

…BUT…..unlike a regular PC screen…

- ….You can write directly onto this screen.
- Just like any PC you can save your work, except you are saving your board work, no more "Can I clear the board yet", or hunting hopelessly for the board rubber

So, not only does the board behave like a regular whiteboard because you can write on it, but anything you can do on a computer with your students, you can do on the IWB