I’ve written before on viewing history as experiment, with the present as the result, and noted how that way of thinking can help us understand where we are now. I’ve just come across a wonderful article by John Clare of the Daily Telegraph 28/11/01. I haven’t been able to find it from the Telegraph website, so I can’t be sure this attribution is correct. Nevertheless, the article describes how Mr Clare, a writer well known for his scepticism of the benefits of ICT in education, comes across a piece of technology he really believes will help teaching and learning:

After years of writing with scepticism and even hostility about the millions being spent on equipping schools with computers and connecting them to the internet, I have at last seen an electronic system that really does have the potential to improve teaching and enhance children’s learning.

I now also understand why, despite all the expenditure and hype, computers have made little impact so far on what happens in the classroom: their promoters have been trying to force teachers to change what they do instead of to help them to do it better.

What could this device be? The interactive whiteboard, of course. (Remember this article was written in 2001.)

And that is what sets my new discovery apart: it is designed to help teachers teach as they want to. It is called an electronic whiteboard and consists of a screen measuring about 5ft by 4ft, fixed to the wall at the front of the class and a projector that hangs from the ceiling. It is a computer and a blackboard rolled into one; “chalk and talk” made electronic, and it can transform whole-class teaching.

Above all, it enables teachers to illustrate their lessons to make them clearer and more interesting. They can use the whiteboard to display film clips (for example, in English, history and foreign languages), animations (science, geography, PE, design and technology), graphs and charts (science and maths), and maps, documents and photographs (history, geography, art, religious education) taken from educational CD-Roms, videos and the internet, or scanned in from their own resources.

Assuming the roles of researcher, director and presenter, teachers can assemble their lessons like a television documentary, selecting the material that best illuminates what they want to say, confident that the whole class can see the screen, and confident of the whole class’s attention.

But that is not all. The whiteboard also functions as a blackboard, with an electronic pen doubling up as computer mouse and chalk. Everything the teacher writes on the board can be saved on the computer [my emphasis] (in its original form or converted to computer text), building up a bank of material that can be used again and that pupils can access at will.

This is a truly remarkable record of an early example of the misunderstanding of interactive whiteboards (see earlier post) Mr Clare describes admirably the advantages of having a computer in the classroom, and being able to show a class full of students the output from the computer- this is the computer-digital projector apparatus. The remarkable thing about Mr Clare’s article is that only the italicised part refers to a unique capability of the interactive whiteboard itself. Like so many others after him, Mr Clare has witnessed the initial introduction of a computer, teaching software, projection system, and IWB into a classroom and attributed all the educational advantages to the whiteboard itself. He even defines an ‘electronic whiteboard’ as ‘a screen …fixed to the wall…  and a projector that hangs from the ceiling’ which is plain wrong. The electronic whiteboard is the thing fixed to the wall. The projector is the thing fixed to the ceiling. If that system were always bought as a sealed unit, there would be no damage done by the misunderstanding. But the whiteboard, the input device that is plugged as a peripheral into the wonderful computer, software, and projector, is the most expensive part of the system. It was probably twice the cost of the other components put together, and it contributed a tiny part of the teaching and learning benefit.

This would be trivial if it were not for Mr Clare’s final point:

They cost pounds 4,300 each, which, in the context of spending on ICT, is not very much.

I would suggest that even at the time, it was very much, and even though they cost less now, they are still the most expensive single piece of equipment in the classroom, and I would argue they still contribute the least educational value for money.

The assumption that 100% of the A/V presentation at the front of the classroom is attributable to the provision of an interactive whiteboard seems to have become pervasive in the corridors of power since that time, to the extent that huge investments have been made in this technology in all schools in the country; yet I’m not at all sure that decision makers fully grasped the genuine division of costs and benefits in those pieces of equipment at the front of the class. There are many wonderful teachers who make the most of IWBs and I daresay many of them wring good value for money out of their IWBs. But many boards hang limply on their walls all over the land, the limits of their interactivity being to show a green light when the computer is properly connected, or telling a computer they’ve been touched which then causes a line to be projected onto them- an effect more quckly, accurately and cheaply produced by a pen on a dry-wipe board.