More on IWBs

The Changing Role of the Teacher in using the IWB
http://www.durhamlea.org.uk/resources/index.html?_Action=viewrecord&_Id=1112
In this article/post Miss Eaton describes her experiences using an IWB in her Years 3 and 4 classrooms. She describes how she was initially nervous, using the IWB as a fancy whiteboard with minimal student interaction (getting students to complete sentences), to using it as an interactive, class learning based tool. She describes one example where a sentence was shown and each student contributed to the best of their ability to improve the quality of the sentence. A concern in this example though is "poorer ability children simply added a full stop" and how they actually challenged themselves in doing this. She describes that the students describes themselves as learning for themselves, constructing their learning together (a constructivist teacher's dream), with the teacher's work is in the preparation of topic flipcharts. This is a positive example of the interactive classroom use of an IWB, however I wonder if the age group of the students was part of its success.

On interactive whiteboards (again!)
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/scott-thornbury/interactive-whiteboards-again
In this post by Scott Thornbury he gives an balanced view of the use of IWBs in classrooms, with a personal direction to the language classroom. He discusses how IWBs have been introduced to British schools to help with the motivation of students, and how students became less motivated once they were used to the technology. Also discussed is IWBs as a presentation tool, saying

"IWBs deliver content better, arguably, because (a) they are networked, (b) they combine multi-media functions that were once distributed across audio, video, and computer media, (c) they are visual, auditory, AND kinaesthetic and (d) they are relatively easy to use."

But brings up that the use of IWBs can easily become a teacher centric presention at the front of the classroom. I feel that the most eloquent point that Scott Thornbury makes is "if IWBs are to be truly facilitative, it is their (socially) interactional potential that needs to be optimised". That is, if IWBs are to help students learn, they need to be used for social interaction between students. This is the same point as was made in 'The Changing Role of the Teacher in using the IWB'. The comments to the post are an involved discussion about the use of IWBs and their experiences with the technology.