Gary Stager on Interactive White Boards
October 10, 2006 by warrick
In Wozcast 13, put together back in August, I talked about the Curriculum Corporation Conference and expressed some doubts I had about interactive white boards. South Australian educator Graham Wegner later defended them in a comment saying ‘don’t dismiss the IWB movement yet – at least, not in primary schools where there is a real chance the use of the board for learning could be placed in the students’ hands.’ (Graham Wegner)
l like Wegner’s thinking, and his comment captured my concern: that interactive whiteboards were a return to the teacher centred paradigm of the old classroom and a nice way for schools to say they’re into technology without having to change a thing about the teaching and learning.
So I was interested to see today Gary Stager’s ACEC 2006 paper, Has Educational Computing Jumped the Shark?, which in typical Stager fashion, has some pretty tough things to say about how most schools are working with these technologies and where he says of IWBS:
“Intelligent” white boards may appear as cost-effective strategies for advancing a school’s technological capability, yet these Pre-Gutenberg technologies may ultimately reinforce the worst of existing classroom practices. They reinforce the dominance of the front of the room and omniscience of the teacher. Facilitating increased lecturing and reducing education to notes on a board represents a step backwards. We should question the widespread appeal of these products. The sales success of clever furniture is undeniable, but its actual use is less clear.
Thanks to Bret Moller for his blog, which is where I first saw the Stager comments.
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Well I am still finding it hard to get a good answer on all this. How do we make sure that this “smart furniture” is not amplifying old teaching techniques. After hearing Gary and many others speak I am more and more convinced that the interactive whiteboard craze is not really changing teaching and learning in a positive way at all. I think they look good in a classroom and in the case of most private schools they certainly impress an ilinformed parent body who are looking for the right school to send their child to.
[...] I’ve always been a little underwhelmed by the interactive whiteboard push, mainly because to me it mirrors so much the old paradigm; teacher with blackboad, demonstrating …stuff. I talked about it a bit in Wozcast13 and liked some of Gary Stager’s comments on them too. [...]
[...] Over the past month, I’ve done three presentations on ACTIVboards to three slightly different audiences. The first was to a local school wanting to get a first hand look at what an IWB actually was, the second was a favour to the ACTIVboard sales rep showcasing their product (which we have) to a school trying to pick their preferred brand and thirdly, a repeat of our International Middle Schooling Conference presentation to our local cluster group of middle school teachers. What was really interesting was that each presentation evoked different responses and different questions – and it really makes me stop and think about the fact that as teachers we all have unique world views. I received a timely email from Quentin D’Souza shortly after who posed an excellent question about questions in relation to what questions I would ask now in regards to the effective use of IWB’s. There have also been a couple of excellent posts querying this focus on IWB technology – one from Warrick Wynne and a lengthy effort from Derek Wenmoth. I shared Derek’s with my staff via the weekly bulletin and had a few teachers commenting how his insights hit home. [...]