The Interactive Whiteboards, Pedagogy and Pupil Performance ...

technology in much the same terms (SMART technologies inc, 2004), as do the
descriptions of in-service courses designed to encourage the professional uptake of
IWBs and their application. There is a commonsense convergence across these
fields on very similar notions of what the technology can do. Two further reviews of
the literature undertaken by Smith et al (2005) and Glover et al (2005) bear this out,
as do literature reviews carried out for the DfES as part of evaluation projects based
at Manchester Met (Somekh et al, 2005) and Newcastle University (Higgins et al,
2005). Only Australia provides a significantly different language in which to describe
the technology’s potential, using the phrase “digital hub” to capture their expectations
for teaching and learning with IWBs:
IWBs can be used as simple whiteboards, as interactive whiteboards, as large
screen digital convergence facilities and when in the hands of an expert
teacher, with an appreciation of the many roles the technology can perform, as
a digital teaching and learning hub. …. In the next few years as the IWB and
related digital technology develops at pace, the teachers’ mastery and
expectations of the technology grows and the concept of the digital hub
becomes clearer so too will there be the opportunity to enhance the quality of
teaching and the level and appropriateness of student learning.
(http://www.iwb.net.au/public/content/ViewCategory.aspx?id=2):
The realisation of the technology in context
At the current moment in time a much smaller research literature is available which
studies whether and how the potential of the technology is realised through use in
everyday classroom teaching. Data collection extends beyond a self-selecting
sample of teachers who have specifically chosen to work with the technology to
focus on a broader range of staff who have access to the technology within a
particular setting. Methods employed include classroom observation and survey.
To-date most of these case studies are modest in scale, involving either brief periods
of observation or survey data collected from a comparatively small sample. Some
larger scale studies underpinned by a more robust methodology are either in the
process of reporting, or on going.
Of the small scale studies, looking across this body of work as a whole, there is far
less consensus over what the best use of the technology turns out to be in practice
than the literature about the technology’s potential might lead one to suppose.
Coghill (2002), for instance, found considerable variation in use across the sites she
looked at (5 teachers in two primary schools). She comments:
‘The teachers in this study were all using the interactive whiteboard in different
ways and had different views and interests in its potential.... The participants’
pedagogical approach to using the interactive whiteboard varied considerably.’
(Coghill, 2002. 7.1)
Indeed, part of the point that she makes is that for these teachers it was relatively
easy to accommodate the technology to existing ways of working, rather than
transform ways of working to accommodate to the technology.
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