Continuing on the theme of moving classroom technology away from being solely about the interactive whiteboard, I’d like to to deal with the first 2 of the 5 categories mentioned in my previous blog. These categories are an attempt to move towards a more fluid approach to planning a whole-class teaching strategy, so deal with the different components of WCT. How schoools, and even individual teachers, put them together is completely down to free choice.
Front-of-Class Display
For any whole-class teaching solution, it’s essential to have at least one large display – to engage the whole class, the whole class needs to be able to see what you’re talking about. It’s sometimes overlooked that the interactive whiteboard has a dual function: one is to lend control, but the other is to provide a surface on which to display. Of course doing this is impossible without a projector, and projectors have progressed fantastically over the last few years, with fully networked projectors, brighter, more efficient and longer lasting lamps and instant-off all helping to make the projector an effective and robust display device. Short and ultra-short projectors have minimised shadowing and health and safety risks, as well as enabling all-in-one and height-adjustable IWB’s. However, there are now alternatives to the projector-based display.
The falling price of plasma and LCD screens has made them a more viable alternative, with the added bonus of no separate projection device necessary. Used in combination with an interactive overlay, they also emulate the control aspects of the IWB, but all in one easily installed device. With high resolution and great picture quality when using other media (no need to wheel TVs around the school), built in speakers and lots of inputs including High Definition, then the flat panel large format display device is becoming a more common feature in the classroom. Whether constraints on size (and the associated cost of super-sizing your screen) can be overcome is debatable, but it does provide a real niche for certain installations, and is an excellent alternative for special educational needs where expensive and bulky rear projection units have been the only option until now.
Front-of-Class Control
First of all you need your large display, but teachers also then need to be able to take control of what’s happening on the display. It’s not absolutely essential that control comes from the front of the class, but despite some of the protestations from certain quarters that this is solely an updated version of “chalk and talk”, there are times when teaching from the front of the class is the most effective means of imparting a message.
Despite all the developments that take ICT use in the classroom beyond the IWB, it would be a gross miscalculation to think that their time has passed. IWBs still form the central whole-class teaching tool, and have continued to evolve: dual touch versions have started to arrive for multiple simultaneous inputs, height adjustable all-in-one units allow much greater flexibility and each board’s software continues to release newer and more powerful versions to give more power to your teaching elbow.
But sometimes a “traditional” IWB (if technology which is less than 10 years old can be referred to as “traditional”) is just not suitable for the physical conditions of the room, or may pose a risk for the students. So, as mentioned in the last section, an alternative is large format display screens, which can now have an interactive overlay fitted to them that gives the same functionality as an IWB. Smart Boards have always been the market leader for IWB’s, but they also produce an overlay for screens which gives you all the functionality and tools of their famous board, but for a plasma or LCD screen.
Both these technologies work on a very similar premise, but there is another front-of-class control device which has quietly been building up significant support. The e-beam is a small boomerang shaped device that can be placed near any corner of a display and instantly turns the display into an interactive one. Perhaps some people have been put off in the past with the first attempt to cheaply emulate IWBs: The Mimio, but the e-beam is very different and has been winning admirers throughout education. My own role within RM is to go out and demonstrate whole-class teaching technology in schools, and the e-beam for me means I no longer have to haul heavy boards up and down stairs and struggle to get set-up, all I do is project onto a flat service, attach the e-beam to the wall (or dry-wipe board as is more often the case), and I have instant interactivity.
There are many advantages to the e-beam: set-up is extremely simple for sharing around classes, and you’re not constrained to set image sizes. With the arrival of the ultra-short throw projector, a new way of utilising the e-beam has emerged, and the interactive tabletop has caused a real stir since debuting at last year’s BETT show. It’s a simple solution to an idea that many major manufacturers (Microsoft and Smart to name a few) are currently developing advanced solutions for – albeit at perhaps 10 times the cost. We’ll come back to this idea later as, unlike when the e-beam is used on a wall, the tabletop combination doesn’t really fall into the category of “Front of Class”, but it is a great example of how to be more flexible with technology to reach class activities that were previously more difficult.
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