The Interactive Whiteboards, Pedagogy and Pupil Performance ...

textbooks or worksheets. This is true of many of the commercially available texts as
well as the texts which teachers design for their own use.
Illustrative case study. Example A: The IWB used like a text book
Core Subject: Science
Topic: Convection
Energy : heat transfer
The correct phrase is ‘thermal transfer’.
Heat energy can be transferred (moved) in 4 ways:
1. Conduction
2. Convection
3. Evaporation
4. Radiation
Which ever way heat moves, it always moves from
HOT to COLD.
Heat energy only flows when there is a temperature difference.
Energy : heat transfer
2. Convection
! To understand how heat can be transferred by
convection, the idea of density is important.
! If water, oil and air
are mixed up, they
will settle out in
order of density -
which one will rise to
the top?
! The air is least dense
and the water is the
most dense - it
depends on how far
apart the particles are.
© Boardworks Ltd 2003
© Boardworks Ltd 2003
Figure 3: IWB texts used like a text book
In this physics lesson the teacher uses a commercially produced text displayed
on the IWB in the same way as she might a textbook. She works through each
page of the text with the class. She reads aloud the captions, indicates the
drawings and tells children which aspects of these to attend to. The lesson is
teacher led and the text is offered up as a definitive authoritative text. However,
because the “textbook” has migrated from the desk to the screen, the IWB text
re-focuses attention on the collective view of the same object – much in the way
a ‘big book’ would in the primary school classroom. The text on the screen
encompasses short animated simulation sequences that demonstrate the
teaching points being made in visual form.
When the potential of IWBs was most clearly harnessed to producing new kinds of
text or new forms of text design that could offer distinctive opportunities for learning
and teaching, the most innovative practice included:
• The display, editing and annotation of short edited digital clips;
• Real time annotation of existing texts;
• Real time creation, manipulation and processing of texts.
The use of animation or visual representation to reinforce conceptual learning is
most commonly found in Maths or Science.
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