Graham Stanley Shares Thoughts about IWBs

Graham Stanley teaches English for the British Council in Barcelona. His enthusiasm for ICT in the EFL classroom made him the perfect candidate for this interview about interactive whiteboards. Thank you to Shelly Terrell for helping us find the right guest this month.

Graham Stanley

Tara: Thanks for offering to share a little knowledge about interactive whiteboards with TEFL.net readers. I’ve heard lots of teachers saying they could never imagine teaching without one. Are you one of those teachers?

Graham: Well, I have to say it’s easy to get used to teaching with an IWB, mainly because of access to the Internet. Suddenly you have the real world at your fingertips instead of the cardboard cut-out world of the average course-book. However, there are times in my classes when it never gets switched on. You have to remember that it’s just a tool to help you get the job done, which in our case is helping our students learn and practise a language. You shouldn’t be afraid to switch it off. I’ve seen some teachers overuse it. That tends to happen with teachers who have just started using the IWB, or when someone hasn’t really had much training in how to use it effectively. And when I say ‘effectively’ I mean in a pedagogically sound way.You wouldn’t want to stand at a blackboard all class, would you? Well it’s the same with an IWB.

Tara: Is it true that having an IWB is just like having a big computer at the front of the classroom? I read that one of your learners called it Graham’s Magical Board.

Graham: Ha ha ha! That was a comment made by Marc, a son of one of the teachers of the British Council in Barcelona, where I teach. When we started with IWBs we only had one. I was the ICT co-ordinator at the time and during the summer school, teachers brought their classes in according to a rota for a session on the IWB. The learners had never seen one before and it was like the technological equivalent to the magic show. Anyone walking past the room would have heard the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahhs’ and wondered what on earth was happening inside. It’s not the right way to do it, but we didn’t know then. If a school decides to go down the IWB road, then they shouldn’t just buy one, although this is tempting because it’s cheaper. The real benefits come when the IWBs are in all or most of the classrooms, when teachers have been given adequate training in how to use one (both from a technical point-of-view and a pedagogical one) and when they can rely on the thing working without much fuss when they walk into the classroom. This is important and a reason why I’d avoid portable or stick-on IWBs and recommend your organisation buys the fixed ones. You’ll waste too much time with a portable one faffing about trying to get it set up at the beginning of a lesson, and I’ve heard from teachers who’d used the IWBs that are stuck onto normal whiteboards that bits of them keep dropping off during the lesson. It gets to the point when a teacher will just decide it’s not worth the bother.

Tara: How much training is required to really understand how to use an IWB, and in your experience are most teachers receiving the training they need?

Graham: This is the key. It’s probably the technology with the most potential to transform the classroom experience, but only if you realise it’s not like any other board you’ve used. I like to use the term ‘connected classroom’ for an IWB-equipped room. Unfortunately, bizarrely, many organisations spend a lot of money on installing the the hardware and scrimp on the teacher training. That’s because it looks like a normal whiteboard I suppose. But to use it well is to adopt a whole new approach to ‘board-work’. Otherwise it’s equivalent to buying a SUV to nip down to the corner shop and back. You’re better off not bothering. Why? Because without proper training, at the best teachers will use them to show Youtube videos and write on them as they did the normal whiteboard. At the worst, they’ll become frustrated and ignore the IWB completely. Most of the bad reputation that an IWB has gained in certain circles is down to lack of teacher training and/or misuse. In my experience, unfortunately, most institutions do not provide sufficient training for teachers.

Tara: How important is confidence in relation to using IWBs and where can teachers find support?

Graham: It’s extremely important. Fortunately, apart from the odd Luddite, most teachers have realised that they need to know how to use some educational technology – there’s a growing demand for training and workshops. Sessions with hands-on practice is where teachers will grow in confidence. They need to be given time to use the board in a supportive atmosphere, which usually involves the best IWB training sessions having a short input session followed by a longer practice session, and then this is repeated. Often the best way to finish off a training session is with a ‘show-and-tell’ session, when the teachers get to practise using the IWB in simulated classroom mode. There are also some groups online you can find, but nothing specifically aimed at language teaching and IWB use that I know of, which is a shame. Partly because of this, there’s a new European project proposal in the works, which the British Council Barcelona are part of, aimed at building and supporting a teacher community and providing examples of best practice. We should find out whether we have been successful with this in July this year. I think good practice with IWBs is something we need to see more of, and this is also why IATEFL’s Learning Technology SIG (of which I am the coordinator) will be holding its pre-conference event on pedagogy and IWBs next year.

Tara: Which types of websites are best for IWB use?

Graham: For ELT, anything that encourages our students to produce more language. Obviously, one of the great things an IWB can bring into the classroom are pictures. I am not good at drawing and I remember trying to draw a horse on the board in a beginners class and my students thought it was a dog. With tools such as Flickr or Google images, you have instant access to images that can be really helpful. One example is a question I was asked by an upper-intermediate student : ‘What’s the difference between a geek and a nerd?’ Definitions of these kinds of words are not very helpful, especially as the public’s conception of meaning is still changing. Instead of trying to explain I searched Google images for both words and we compared them. I think the resulting discussion about labelling people was one of the highlights of the year for the students in that class.

Tara: What types of English learning materials are being created specifically for IWB?

Graham: I have to admit that I am no big fan of the course-book packs that have been produced for ELT connected classroom. A lot of these seem to be just glorified scanned textbooks, and although it is useful having instant access to audio and video, I question the value of just using the IWB to display a coursebook which you’d want the learners to have anyway if you’re using it. Having said that, I think ELT publishers are definitely getting better at designing materials for the interactive whiteboard and I have seen a few supplementary packs that have been specially designed for IWB use, especially for young learners, that work very well in the classroom.

Tara: In your opinion, do teachers who use IWBs in class spend more or less time on lesson prep than those without these magical boards?

Graham: When you start preparing lessons you’ll spend a lot more time, obviously, because you need to learn how the software works. It helps if you’ve ever played around with a computer painting/image package, because most of the IWB software is a combination of this and presentation (i.e. Powerpoint) software. Once you’ve got the hang of it, you spend no longer than usual prepping for a class, and in fact, if there’s a healthy resources sharing attitude in an organisation then this helps a great deal as you can reuse flipcharts that other teachers have made. The reusable factor wins in the end – it means that you can have your board work for the whole course saved digitally to reuse, share with learners, and to go back to at any point in the future if you are teaching the same course again.

Tara: One criticism of the IWB is that it has the potential to make learners less interactive. What can teachers do to make sure that their lessons do not become teacher centred?

Graham: Only use the board when it adds pedagogic value to the activity. Make sure learners don’t spend a large proportion of the lesson sitting staring at the board when they should be communicating with each other. I’m a great fan of Dogme ELT and the idea of ‘materials light’ lessons appeals to me. I like the idea of spontaneity in the classroom and using the people in the room to generate the language and the agenda of a lesson. Having an IWB means you have access to many more possibilities (via saved resources, the Internet, etc) than you otherwise would as a teacher. You need to learn how to judge.

Tara: Is it possible to effectively use IWB in a large classroom of 30 or more?

Graham: The larger the class size, I think the more teacher-centred it’ll tend to be. With large classes, having an IWB will certainly help to quickly display information, etc and will save time having to write on the board (you can do this beforehand for much of what you plan to do). So, I actually think it’s a boon to have an IWB if you have a large class.

Tara: How do IWBs come into play during pair or small group work?

Graham: First, it’s important to get the students using the board. It can’t be just a tool for teachers. I encourage my students to come up and write their names on the board during the first class and I take photos of them and use their signatures and the snapshots as a class register and then for organising groups and as counters in any games we play using the board. Using what you display on the board as stimulus for pair-work/group-work is the main way I use it, and I also want to underline that if it’s not going to add anything pedagogically to an activity, then a teacher should turn it off during pair-work, when you usually want the learners to look and talk to each other, not at a board (any board).

Tara: What’s one thing you do in class now that you could not do without an IWB?

Graham: There’s one thing that comes to mind – I play a sentence ordering activity in class that I couldn’t do with a normal board (it would be too fiddly and require cutting up bits of paper and faffing about with blu-tac). For example, to practise phrasal verbs, the students in a group go to the board and have to order a sentence on the board but there are two extra prepositions, so as well as having to think of the correct sentence order, they have to choose the correct phrasal verb. It’s great for practising and when played as a competitive group activity tends to engage all of the students in a class (As it’s timed, when one group runs out of time, the next group can finish it off for a bonus point).

Tara: Thanks Graham! You’ve really taken some of the mystery out of the IWB for me, and I hope to get the opportunity to teach with one in the future.

Graham: Thank you – it’s always good to reflect on practice in this way – it helps you think about what you do and question if it’s of real value.

Connect with Graham Stanley
Follow @grahamstanley on Twitter
Graham’s blog: http://blog-efl.blogspot.com
IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG