I was struck by this description of Interactive Whiteboards on the government and BECTA funded website nextgenerationlearning.org.uk:

For many schools interactive whiteboards have revolutionised lessons. For example, the combination of a teacher explaining something that might be complicated, such as angles in maths, and seeing it come to life on the screen means it takes a lot less time to understand.

• Teachers can record, save, and reuse information, and present content in different styles. This saves time, improves the pace of lessons and leads to greater pupil understanding of what is being taught.
• Applications include interactive features which allow children to move and change images, text and objects on the board in front of the class.
• Video, sound and animation can all be included in the lessons, deepening engagement – especially with early learners.
• Lessons can be edited, expanded or changed as teachers and learners work. This flexibility means the teacher can focus on groups or individuals who are having difficulties. The material can be recalled and reused instantly to help understanding. 

Each sentence in this description is either incorrect or flawed. Taking each in turn:

1. For many schools interactive whiteboards have revolutionised lessons. For example, the combination of a teacher explaining something that might be complicated, such as angles in maths, and seeing it come to life on the screen means it takes a lot less time to understand.
   For many schools, interactive whiteboards were installed at the same time as projectors and computers. The combination of this hardware and the teaching and lesson management software included with many interactive whiteboards has indeed revolutionised lessons. The whiteboard itself is an input device and has not revolutionised lessons. Seeing a complicated thing come to life on screen requires a computer, projector and screen, not an interactive whiteboard.
2. Teachers can record, save, and reuse information, and present content in different styles. This saves time, improves the pace of lessons and leads to greater pupil understanding of what is being taught.
   Teachers can record, save and reuse information, and present in different styles, because they have computers, software and projectors. The whiteboard does not do any of this.
3. Applications include interactive features which allow children to move and change images, text and objects on the board in front of the class.
   This is true, although blackboards, whiteboards, magnetic boards, and pegboards have allowed this for many years.
4. Video, sound and animation can all be included in the lessons, deepening engagement – especially with early learners.
   Video, sound and animation can all be included in the lessons without any input from an interactive whiteboard.
5. Lessons can be edited, expanded or changed as teachers and learners work. This flexibility means the teacher can focus on groups or individuals who are having difficulties. The material can be recalled and reused instantly to help understanding. 
   This is a confused point. Lessons can always be edited, expanded or changed as teachers and learners work. The teacher can always focus on groups or individuals who are having difficulties. Material can always be recalled and reused instantly. The point is essentially extolling the benefits of teaching software such as Smart Notebook, which is undeniably useful for teachers. There is no mention of the contribution of the interactive whiteboard in these benefits.

Taken at face value, it would appear that BECTA are unable to point out a single benefit of interactive whiteboards themselves, as opposed to the uncontroversial benefits of the computer, software, and projector that is required to make the whiteboard work.

I believe it is important to understand what the interactive whiteboard really is- a large input graphics tablet mounted on the wall, onto which is projected a calibrated computer screen. It is an input device. As such, its unique benefit is simply to be able to bring students to the front of the class and allow them to interact with the projected image by direct input to the computer. It is trivial to allow students to interact with a projected image- one can simply project onto a dry-wipe whiteboard, and they can use pens. The uniqueness of the interactive whiteboard is that the computer is aware of the interaction, and can therefore react (by scoring the interaction, changing the projected image, etc) and save the results.

It is important when judging the importance of the interactive whiteboard in education to assess how much educational benefit is in fact derived by bringing children to the front AND having them interact with a projected image AND saving the results of the interaction. If any of these conditions are not met, then the interactive whiteboard (with its accompanying expense) cannot be justified. If you don’t want to bring students to the front, you’d be better off with a slate or tablet PC. If you don’t need them to interact with a projected image, you don’t need the whiteboard as an input device. If you don’t want to save the interaction, then you could probably achieve the same results by allowing students to write on a dry wipe whiteboard onto which an image is projected.

In my opinion, the importance of the interactive whiteboard is significantly overestimated. My school was recently inspected by OFSTED, and the inspectors were moved to comment:

‘In most lessons, teachers make good use of interactive whiteboards, with stimulating demonstration and exemplification.’

It was nice of them to see, but in a school where we make significant use of an enormous range of new technology, with some innovations attracting national attention, it was odd to see them making their only specific comment on the school’s IT systems on what is, after all, an input device- and one that doesn’t demonstrate or exemplify at that.

The downside to all this is that attention is diverted away from the real star of the show- the teaching software. The real revolution has been in the development of software that is designed to do all of the things BECTA assigns to the interactive whiteboard. The interactive whiteboard manufacturers know this- the board is just  a simple object mounted on the wall. The software is the part of their product that they are constantly enhancing and developing, because that’s what actually makes a difference to teaching and learning. Without this, teaching software would essentially be Powerpoint and other presentation software. Teaching software allows teachers to plan and manage lessons, create and aggregate resources, build interactivity and collaboration.

Understanding the actual contributions of the parts of the computer- software- projector- interactive whiteboard system is the first step to appropriate allocations of resource. Knowing that the software can be used without the whiteboards can theoretically lead to savings. Knowing that teachers need training not on the use of whiteboards (duh! make contact with the board and move your finger / pen…) but on the use of teaching software places the training need within the realms of the other software training that teachers require- in MIS systems, productivity software, web 2.0 applications, etc.