Teachers Hold the Real Keys to Whiteboard Effectiveness

Educator skill seen to determine the technology's impact

By Mary Catherine O'Connor, Ed Week

Thumb and ring finger together, up in the air as if she is about to lead an orchestra. She holds it there for a few moments until her class of 18 rambunctious 3rd and 4th graders at Parker Elementary School, a public school in Oakland, Calif., settles down. She then turns back to the interactive whiteboard at the front of class to continue the day’s lesson, which includes math, language fluency, and comprehension, and which utilizes the whiteboard’s touchscreen, writing pens, an interactive quiz, and its ancillary student-response system.

Her students at the 230-student school aren’t normally so restless, she later explains, but they had some steam to blow off since they’d just spent the full morning taking the first part of their California Standards Tests, or CSTs. In fact, she spends this class session preparing for the next day of testing, by using the interactive whiteboard, or IWB, to work through CST-style multiple-choice questions with the class.

Despite the students’ restlessness, all eyes are on the board and the children’s excitement is palpable at key moments throughout the class, such as when Ms. Simoneaux announces it’s time for a math quiz. As sets of two students walk to the IWB to vie against each other during timed math problems, their classmates cheer them on. And the moment Ms. Simoneaux has the slightest hiccup with the whiteboard software, a number of students yell out suggestions on how to fix it.

Clearly, the students like using the interactive whiteboards. But is the technology improving their education? One doesn’t need to look far to find detractors, who consider interactive whiteboards to be nothing more than expensive overhead projectors.

While some multiyear studies have linked the technology to gains in academic achievement, many experts stress that IWBs are only as good as the teachers who use them.

“Some people think [the IWB] is a magic bullet that will solve everything,” said Patrick Ledesma, a school-based technology specialist and special education department chair at the 746-student Holmes Middle School, which is part of the Fairfax County public schools in Virginia. He is also a current teacher-ambassador fellow for the U.S. Department of Education. But once interactive whiteboards have been installed, “teachers will do what they’ve always done, unless there is training or support to do things differently,” he said.

“An IWB is just a tool, and if it’s not used correctly, you can’t blame the tool, you have to blame the user,” he added. “If you’re a teacher who used to lecture at a chalkboard, you’ll do the same with the IWB.”

Reinforcing Lessons

Ms. Simoneaux, for one, is a proponent of the technology.

Now in her third year with an interactive whiteboard, she says she uses it, and the student-response system, to get immediate insight into the pace at which her students are learning. When a question she poses using the response system gets a slow response (the tally of answers is shown in real time on the screen), she immediately knows that her students aren’t “getting” the problem at hand. It needs reinforcement. With a paper-based quiz, that’s something she wouldn’t know until after the class was already over.

Plus, the response system “gives them a chance to think for themselves,” by removing the physical prompts that students could rely on in the past, Ms. Simoneaux said. During preparation for the state test, she used to ask students to answer multiple-choice questions by holding up the number of fingers that corresponded with their answers (one finger for A, three for C). But rather than giving their own answers, many students would just copy the responses of the best-performing student.

Ms. Simoneaux also appreciates the way in which talking through practice test questions with her students provides an even pace. “My favorite is my ability to isolate the test questions and focus the children on the question I am addressing,” she said. When she used paper tests, “several children would always rush ahead to finish rather than go at my instructional pace, and they’d miss the strategy I am teaching.”

And because the entire class works through each problem interactively, she said, “the children also get to share their strategies with their classmates, so I am not the only voice of knowledge.”

Of course, a teacher could isolate questions this way with a laptop and projector, but the IWB allows her to annotate the problem and then move on to the next one, without having to stop and erase the board. And the IWB software archives each slide, so nothing is ever …

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Mary Catherine O'Connor is a freelance journalist who lives in San Francisco.