ф.ғ.к. Утегенова Гулзира Жақсылыковна, магистр Анефияева Анжела Ерболқызы, оқытушы Кемелова Салима Нурметова

Халықаралық гуманитарлық-техникалық университеті,

№29 Ә. Молдагулова ат. ЖОМ

METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF INTRODUCING INTERACTIVE WHITE BOARD (IWB) IN TEACHING PROCESS

The first revolutionary teaching tool- the humble blackboard - found its way into classrooms back in 1801 and had a profound impact on the nature of teaching over the next 200 years. The blackboard became synonymous with the traditional classroom and, along with shiny red apples, is still seen as a stereotypical symbol of education. The interactive whiteboard - or IWB - has the potential to be the second revolutionary teaching tool. Just as the blackboard was seen as a key part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classrooms, the IWB has the capability to become synonymous with the new digital classrooms of the twenty-first century. Despite its relative newness, the IWB exhibits the same capacity to fundamentally change - and indeed revolutionise - the nature of teaching.

In the same way that the old-style blackboards were a technology that could be used in traditional schools every day by all teachers, interactive whiteboards are already displaying their facility to be used in this 'every-day-by-every-teacher' way in our emerging digital schools. Because of their capacity to become an embedded part of a modern classroom, the IWB may just serve to be the catalyst that finally moves schools away from the traditional paper-based model towards a more integrated digital mode of operation. The traditional paper-based school has existed in more or less the same form literally for centuries, but we are starting to see the beginnings of a shift as schools all over the world start to look for ways to maximise the potential of digital learning and take advantage of the evolving and exciting educational opportunities this digital world brings with it.

However, we need to remind ourselves that this is still just the start of the revolution. The real challenges for teachers at this point in the development of digital classrooms are to see the great potential that lies ahead, to master the tools and the mindset to begin claiming that potential, and to collaborate with their colleagues and students to effectively use these new tools for teaching in a digital world. The IWB has all the characteristics for being a potent tool in this educational shift.

As any new technology arrives, it will inevitably be used initially to continue doing many of the same things that the old technology could do, gradually moving on to reinvent some of the old things in new ways. If we observe most teachers as they begin to work with an IWB, we will probably see them making this shift by converting many of their old paper-based tasks into an equivalent IWB-based task. This is normal behaviour and to be expected as any new technology is adopted, explored and eventually tamed. But we need to remind ourselves that this approach is really just 'old wine in new bottles'. Ultimately, if the true potential of these new tools is to be fully realised, there must come a point where teachers start to think in completely new ways; not just to begin using the technology to do things that are merely a digital version of the old, but rather to create entirely new things that were not possible with the old technologies.

IWBs can let educators do more than just continue with the old ways. As interactive technologies become an accepted part of today's digital classrooms, new and previously unimagined ways are being found to use technology to enhance the teaching and learning process.

In seeking to realise this revolutionising potential, it is important to understand a little of the:

• context within which teachers of the twenty-first century will be working

• shortcomings of the earlier teaching tools

• factors that set this technology apart from the many other instructional technologies that promised to 'revolutionise' teaching in the twentieth century, and

• effective uses of this new tool in the classroom.

The first interactive white board (IWB) system was created more than 18 years ago. Since then, it has been used by a large number of enthusiastic teachers in many countries all over the world. What is more, the number of people is still increasing. IWB is a technical instrument which may be either placed on the wall or on a cart with small portable wheels so that it can be placed anywhere in the classroom or even moved from one room to another. It requires a connection to a computer and data projector as well as operating software, which enables teachers to create their own teaching materials. We may say that we are able to attract students' attention only by combining the opportunities which are offered by computers with the simplicity of the whiteboard. There are more types of IWB but two of them are widely spread in the Czech Republic. The first has a hard surface and requires special pens to write on and the second has a soft surface and pupils can easily write with their fingers on them. Currently, there are three major manufactures of IWB. They are SMART Technologies, which developed Smartboard, the second is Promethean, developer of Active Board, and Hitachi, maker of Hitachi DUO Interactive Whiteboard. Until recently, the first two boards mentioned worked on their own, using their own software, and there was not possibility to create some materials on Smartboard and use them with Active Board. Thanks to an agreement of these two companies, teachers are able to take the most from both of the boards. Interactive boards present data to the whole class and enable students to work with them. They help present new topics in a very interesting, challenging and attention attracting way [7].

Right now, in classrooms around the world, what classroom tools do teachers use most on a day-to-day basis? According to a 2007 study, the most commonly used instructional technologies (other than the teacher's voice, of course) are still the pen, paper and teaching board [8]. This is an important understanding because it highlights a key premise about why interactive whiteboards are different to many of the 'revolutionary' classroom technologies of the past. As a concept, the teaching board is a well-understood tool used by teachers to help perform the job they do in their classrooms every day. This is a great starting point. It acknowledges that while there are many technologies teachers may not be comfortable with, the humble teaching board is already a well-understood part of the way a classroom works. Of course, for many classrooms, those teaching boards are still the old-style blackboards (or green or white ones), but the underlying idea is that a shift to interactive technology as a better, more capable teaching board is essentially a case of rethinking an existing concept that most teachers are already familiar with rather than forcing them into a whole new way of working.

This chapter opened with the statement that interactive whiteboards have the potential to be the second revolutionary teaching tool, and teachers may be thinking: 'But what about the personal computer? Didn't that revolutionise the way we teach?' The PC certainly has had - and will no doubt continue to have - a huge impact on classrooms all over the world, but in most cases it is still more of a learning tool for students than a teaching tool for teachers. There is no argument that the personal computer has been revolutionary in almost every way imaginable and its impact over the last 25 years has been enormous, but when we look at its impact on the actual act of teaching, it is still relatively minimal. In a world where so many industries and professions have been completely reshaped and redefined by the advent of the personal computer, one could argue that the act of teaching (as opposed to the act of learning) has been largely immune to such technological advances.

There are plenty of reasons that account for this. The small screen size does not easily facilitate teaching in a group setting, and most non-IWB classrooms do not have a mounted projector ready for use. The PC is far more engaging when one gets to interact with it on a personal level, so it often fails to be an effective teaching tool in classrooms where the teachers are the only ones with a computer in front of them. The opportunities for connecting students with highly relevant and engaging digital content are enormous, but without some way of sharing those resources on a whole-class basis, the potential of the PC for the purpose of teaching with these resources is fairly limited.

As a tool for connecting teaching to learning in a digital world, the interactive whiteboard appears to be the missing link.

While many teachers use a computer to assist them in their lesson preparation, personal organisation and communication, most of this relates to managing their own individual productivity rather than any systematic way of changing their teaching practice. Although there certainly are some teachers who do make regular use of computers and other digital tools in their teaching, they are still in the minority. The truth is that most schools that claim to be reliant on personal computers only have 20-30 per cent of teachers using those computers with students in any sort of consistent, integrated, meaningful way.

Many students in our schools would be lucky to use computers in class for two hours per week. And these are just the schools where students are able to get regular, or semi-regular, access to computers for learning in an individual situation. Trotting the students off to the computer lab once or twice a week to 'do computers' is hardly an integrated use of technology across the curriculum. However, the prevailing situation is that most teachers simply do not have enough access to the digital tools in their classrooms to allow them to work with their students in a predominantly digital way.

One of the great challenges for schools today is figuring out how to get all their staff - and not just some of them - to embrace the use of digital technologies as a normal part of classroom teaching. It is still somewhat of a rarity. There is, however, strong evidence to suggest that it can be achieved - swiftly and relatively inexpensively—by the wise introduction of interactive whiteboards throughout the school [8]. Figures from the UK indicate that there were only 5 per cent of teachers nationally using IWBs in 2002; however, by 2007 that figure had skyrocketed to 64 per cent [9]. It is this sort of immersive growth that will enable IWB technology to become a standard part of a teacher's daily practice.

There are a number of factors that make IWB technology different to any classroom technology that preceded it. To see IWBs in their proper context, we need to bear in mind the points discussed as follows.

IWBs are really the first electronic instructional technology designed primarily for use by teachers.

All the other electronic technologies, be they film, radio, television or personal computers, were first designed for the general consumer or office markets and then eventually adapted for use in education. For almost all of these products, schools were very much a secondary market. In contrast, the first SMART Board was sold to teachers at a university in 1991, and the first Activboard was sold to a university in the mid 1990s. There are now dozens of other players in this space, all pitching their products specifically at the education market. Because IWB technology was conceived specifically with education in mind, most vendors are displaying considerable commitment and responsiveness to the needs of this market.

Also, although we keep referring to 'interactive whiteboards', it would be a mistake to restrict our thinking to just the board itself. It is worth remembering that there are also a rapidly evolving set of accessories designed to extend the concept of classroom interactivity beyond the board ... wireless slates and tablets, interactive voting devices, interactive text response systems and so on. These devices add further depth to the possibilities afforded by the whole 'IWB' concept, and in fact hint at the real power behind this technology - not so much the board, but the interactivity.

IWBs are the first and, as yet, only digital instructional technology that all the teachers in a school are able to use in their everyday teaching.

While grand claims have been made by both governments and technology corporations about the amount of various technologies that may exist within a school, the research undertaken by Lee and Winzenried [8] in The Use of Instructional Technology in Schools reveals that in 2007 those schools who had deployed interactive whiteboards throughout the school had 100 per cent of their teachers using digital resources in their everyday teaching.

Of course, this is not to say every school that deploys them will automatically get 100 per cent success in integrating technology just because of the existence of the IWBs. Simply putting IWBs in classrooms is no guarantee of success. However, it does suggest that, of the schools who did achieve 100 per cent integration, the implementation of IWBs was consistently a factor. To put it simply, a decision to deploy IWBs throughout a school substantially increases the chances of getting teachers to shift to a more digital mode of working.

Ultimately, success requires far more than just putting IWB hardware into classrooms, but it seems to be a critical part of getting there. After that comes a whole lot of professional development and training as well as rethinking about how these twenty-first century classrooms should work, but in many instances where classrooms are succeeding to do this, the IWB has played a pivotal role in the shift.

In reviewing the vast investment made in digital technology in UK schools since the mid 1990s, Becta, the British education authority, made this historic observation:

This sharp rise in the use of ICT resources in the curriculum has been driven to a large extent by the adoption of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) and related technologies. Interactive whiteboards are a popular technology, in heavy demand by schools and practitioners. They offer transparent benefits to learning and teaching. That is, it is easy for institutions and teachers to recognise how IWBs enrich and enhance learning and teaching—something which may not always be so immediately transparent to practitioners in the case of other technologies.[9, p. 66]

Although computers have been around in schools for over 25 years, there are still many teachers who resist their use in any sort of regular, embedded way. Research suggests that IWBs seem to be acting as an effective 'gateway' for many teachers to start exploring the further use of digital technologies in their classrooms.

References:

1. Glover, D. & Miller, D. (2001). Running with technology: The pedagogic impact of the large-scale introduction of interactive whiteboards in one secondary school. Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 10(3), 257-275.

2. Glover, D. & Miller, D. (2003). Players in the management of change: Introducing interactive whiteboards into the schools. Management in Education, 17(1), 20-23.

3. Greiffenhagen, C. (2000) Interactive whiteboards in mathematics education. Paper presented to ICME 9, Tokyo, 2000

4. Simpson, M., Payne, F, Munro, R and Lynch, E. (1998) ‘Using information and communication technology as a pedagogical tool: a survey of initial teacher education in Scotland’ Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 7 (3) pp. 431-446

5. Colley, A., Comber, C. and Hargreaves, D.(1998) ‘IT and music education : what happens to boys and girls in co-ed and single sex schools’ British Journal of Music Education 10(2) pp 123-4

6. Ligorio, M. B. (2001) ‘Integrating communication formats; synchronous versus asynchronous and text based versus visual’ Computers and Education 37 (2) pp.103-125

7. What the Research Says about Interactive Whiteboards." Government and partners. 2003.Becta. 9 Sept. 2008

8.Lee, M., & Winzenried, A. (2006), Interactive whiteboards: Achieving total teacher usage. Australian Educational Leader, 28(3), 22–25.

9. Becta. (2007). Harnessing technology review 2007: Progress and impact of technology in education: Summary report. Retrieved July 16, 2008,

10. Dale Edgar."Cone of Learning." Chart. NC State University. 8 Sept. 2008