BlogDale

This week I have been playing with my Wii. Following Johnny Chung Lee’s posts about his research into using Wiimotes and an IR pen to create an interactive whiteboard (for less than £50), and Doug Belshaw actually doing it, I’ve mashed up a complete solution that is cheap and convenient.

Interactive whiteboards are like marmite. People either love ‘em or hate ‘em. I know people who believe strongly that the IWB is an expensive luxury in a classroom and that the same learning gains can generally be met using just a projector; conversely I’ve spoken with teachers who believe strongly that the interactive aspect of the board is what makes it useful, and they now wouldn’t be without the IWB. Interestingly, these two poles of opinion were found to be split generally between phases, where primary teachers wouldn’t part with their boards but secondaries were indifferent to them. My own observation was that whereas a huge investment was made in putting IWBs in classrooms, less importance was placed on training teachers how to use them. And so they sat on the wall as an expensive ornament for months until somebody went on a course and found what “other people” were doing with them.

To me, the biggest impact of a school’s investment in IWBs lies not in the whizzy resources that they produce for their own particular brand of IWB with its proprietary software. The biggest impact is to get teachers to use ICT to prepare and deliver rich content that is pertinent and relevant to learning objectives, and the rest will follow. As suggested here, the initial use of an IWB is simply to use it as a data projector and not to exploit the features of the interactive board itself. Surely that represents a wasted investment? Couldn’t we have bought two projectors rather than a projector and board? Yes we could. We should. And now there’s a way to dispense with the expensive board altogether, or at least see if your teaching style needs the features that a board has to offer.

Here’s how I did it…

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