No more nails...

Teacher: Where's your grammar?
Boy: She's in an old people's home.


Sorry, I couldn't help myself this morning with the awful jokes, having emerged blinking and rubbing my eyes from a grammar task that almost put me off my breakfast.




I recently explained the concept of the interactive whiteboard to my elderly mother. I could just as well have been talking about taking a school trip to the moon, so amazed was she. After thinking awhile about the possibility of showing a plant grow from seed to flower and seed again as a speeded up film or animation in front of a class of children, she added:


"How wonderful, now there won't be that horrible scratching noise in the classroom anymore."


My first encounter with an interactive whiteboard took place when I attended my first placement before applying to do PGCE. I was initially struck by how completely at ease the children were with this wonderful mine of possibilities in front of their totally un-astonished faces, and the horror of my own total ineptitude at all things computer-related. Suddenly the comfort of the blackboard, the thing I remember most from my school days, was a thing of the past. No more scratching it to give each other goose-pimples and no more writing naughty words on the back and waiting for the teacher to roll it down and reveal them. 

I actually grew to rather like the interactive whiteboard in my ten days at the school. The children appeared to know how to use it just as well as the teacher and loved any opportunity to get up and demonstrate this. It was tinted to help dyslexic members of the class and when it went out of sync, the pupils took turns to realign it for the teacher; a task of great pride! I was particularly impressed with the way it could be used as graph-paper where needed, a storyboard or a widescreen tv.


Recently I visited a school to observe a phonics lesson, and the interactive whiteboard came into its own again. This time the letters were movable and the children could form words with them, before they were confident at writing them out themselves. The IWB displayed high quality pictures at the same time, absolving the teacher from the embarrassing task of drawing the objects used to demonstrate the phonemes, or messing around with scrappy bits of paper and card.


There are so many different functions of an interactive whiteboard available for the teacher to use. The question for the teacher though, is how interactive does she or he want it to be exactly? This of course depends a lot on the confidence of the teacher with ICT skills and the time he or she wishes to devote to preparing interactive lessons on the IWB. I will try and "mess around" with as many functions as I can personally work out and see if I can produce anything remotely resembling an interactive tool for education. Ultimately it is the children who will benefit from this resource, and their patience with staring at a screen may be better than mine... Hang on, isn't the idea of it being interactive; not just staring at screens? Maybe the advent of interactive technology has finally enabled children to in a sense create their own learning and not just sit and wait for it to come to them. It surely heralds the beginning of a much more inclusive and democratic age in the classroom.


...and finally, something for my old mum who has never used the internet:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HYuO0EP5sU