Interactive White Boards: Engagement Is Not Interaction

What are the other two kids doing?

Sum­mer break has ended; you are feel­ing refreshed and renewed, ready to tackle the New Year and all of its new chal­lenges. You enter your room after your morn­ing meet­ing to dis­cover an inter­ac­tive white­board (IWB) hung neatly in the front of the room where your white board used to be. The dis­trict is involved in a grant to inte­grate tech­nol­ogy into the classroom.

Imme­di­ately your mind begins to whir: “think of all I can do with this.”

Move for­ward in time to Jan­u­ary and the IWB hangs there, appear­ing slightly tar­nished. Oh sure, you begin your lessons with it, post­ing crit­i­cal think­ing ques­tions for the stu­dents to pon­der, and indeed they gaze at it long­ingly each day. You show them inter­est­ing things like sweet web­sites, or edu­ca­tional games. You have kids come up to the IWB to make sen­tence cor­rec­tions or review for a quiz, you cir­cle impor­tant parts of maps, or cells under a micro­scope, stu­dents move pic­tures around like the parts of the puzzle.

But some­where some­thing is eat­ing at you, and you real­ize that your class hasn’t really changed all that much.

Last night #edchat returned to Twit­ter with a warrior’s cry as hun­dreds of edu­ca­tors from all cor­ners of the globe debated whether or not IWBs were inter­ac­tive. The debate spanned the gamut, from the per­pet­ual class war that exists in pub­lic school­ing to the very nature of inter­ac­tiv­ity. Many of my col­leagues argued pas­sion­ately against me, and my stance that IWBs were not interactive.

Here is where I stand.

• IWBs are a great tool, but they are a tra­di­tional tool. Make no mis­take; there is noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary about what an IWB does for your instruc­tion. IWB sim­ply enforce the anti­quated notions in edu­ca­tion that have always existed, of one or few act­ing while the rest react.
• IWBs are a good tool to get stu­dent engage­ment (which we all know is fleet­ing), but they are not inter­ac­tive! Even the best tech­nol­ogy will only allow two points of con­tact upon the board at a time. What are the rest of the stu­dents doing while one or two inter­act with the IWB. This is where my #edchat col­leagues argued that the other stu­dents were brain­storm­ing or doing other activ­i­ties while one or two were using the IWB, and I reply loudly – then what do you need the IWB for?
• In these times where pub­lic schools are crunched for money I would argue that an IWB is the last thing that dis­tricts should buy. Although they are some­thing that is easy to take a pic­ture of and put in the paper, they are not rev­o­lu­tion­ary. If any­thing they are hold­ing us back.