Магистрант Юлдашева М.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

The Effect of IWB when Using in the Classroom

There have been numerous studies carried out on the use of information and communications technologies for educational purposes. One of them was done in 2003 by The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), which is the Government's lead agency for information and communications technology. In addition, there are seminars and conferences dedicated to the use and affectivity of IWB. According to research, there are three key benefits:

· " encourages more varied, creative and seamless use of teaching materials

· engages students to a greater extent than conventional whole-class teaching, increasing enjoyment and motivation"

· facilitates students participation through the ability to interact with materials on the board"

The paper also quotes a teacher, who has been using IWB for a variety of students including those with learning difficulties or other disabilities. He identifies and states that "the power of images and the capacity for collaboration is very significant in whiteboards' impact on learning." [1]

It has been found out that the positive effect of IWBs does not mean only to own them but it is a combination of teachers' skills and the variety of approaches they use. On the other hand some problems have also been indicated. These may be as follows:

· teachers should be well trained in order to use the most of what IWBs offer

· teachers' preparation time may increase

· some prepared materials may use only limited students' interaction

· the possibility of IWBs losing their attraction and teachers resorting to conventional methods

Derek Glover and David Miller, members of the department of Education at University of Keele in the United Kingdom, have been interested in IWB for the last couple of years and have published numerous interesting articles and other publications. According to their research and having taken the previous facts about the problems of ITW into consideration, they found that there are three types of teachers in connection to IWB. They refer to them as:

"Missioners" - those who are really interested in new technologies, use them all the time in their teaching and try to convince others to use them too

"Tentatives" - those who underwent some training, have access to the rooms with IWB but are somehow afraid of them

"Luddites" - those who underwent training, but are afraid of everything new and do not want to use their time and energy. [2, p.267].

Table 1. “The use of interactive whiteboards". (Derek Glover and David Miller)

	% ranking as most important
	Missioners	Tentatives	Luddites
Advantages
Enhanced pupil interest	83	80	63
Motivation	49	28	27
Use of multimedia approaches	45	33	18
Flexibility of teaching method	16	19	32
Effective learning	29	46	0
Improved teacher presentation	64	58	53
Improved structure of lessons	58	27	23
Flexibility of teacher response to individual need	33	56	40
Availability of lesson print-offs	0	0	0
Problems
Problems of access	0	0	18
Siting problems in rooms	13	7	0
Preparation time	87	47	78
Technological ineptitude	53	40	50
Pedagogic problems	25	13	32

The above table shows how these three types of teachers see and rank advantages and problems in the use of interactive whiteboards. It is necessary to stress that Luddites are very sceptical about IWBs, so they do not see any affectivity in using them although they believe that they enhance pupils' interest and their motivation in learning. According to the Becta research, Glover and Miller also identify three levels of IWB use:

· "to increase efficiency, enabling teachers to draw upon a variety of ICT - based resources without disruption or loss of pace

· to extend learning, using more engaging materials to explain concepts

·

to transform learning, creating new learning styles stimulated by interaction with the whiteboard". [1]

schools with IWB schools without IWB

Another research has been done in the Czech Republic by a publishing House Fraus which was the organizer of The European Educational Publishers Group (EEPG) conference. It took place in April 2008 in Prague and different publishers from 14 European countries were presenting their products and discussing the situation with IWB at their schools. The research shows that out of 60 000 schools in the Czech Republic only 4 000 schools have at least one IWB which is unfortunately a very small number. The best situation is in Great Britain where there are IWB in almost all the classrooms. (Fraus)

The following graph clearly shows the situation in the Czech Republic.

MirandaNet Fellowship is an E-community dealing with information technologies which are offered on the market and used in teaching and learning (MirandaNet). In 2000 a research interested in IWB evaluation and its integration in schools was done in UK. Some interesting facts were shown. All the information is based on the previously mentioned research.

How valuable the IWB is within a lesson? 56% respondents claim that it is very useful and 11% cannot imagine their teaching without using it. About 33% teachers see at least some use in IWB.

The use of IWB on regular bases. 67% use IWB in every lesson and the rest of the respondents use it occasionally.

IWB and motivation. Most of the teachers, 78% of all of them, also agreed on the fact that IWB played a very important role in the terms of motivation.

At this point the last research which should be presented was done by Milan Hausner4 and his colleagues who are interested in new information technologies at schools, especially IWB. The research was done in 2005 and although only a small number of teachers participated it still has at least an informational value. Teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire presented on the Internet, to be specific on "Portal na podporu interaktivni vyuky" www.veskole.cz. We can learn that the first impression of an IWB is quite high, 74% but a general impression after using IWBs for some time the number is even higher - 80%. Possible problems might appear when it comes to the preparation time. 62% of the respondents spend about 2 hours for preparing a lesson with the use of IWB and for 12% teachers it takes even more than 2 hours. When it comes to pupils'motivation, it might be complicated to measure it, but from a research we can see that 65% of the teachers think that pupils' motivation increased significantly and 22% cannot say or prove the changes. We can see that most of the teachers have the impression of increased motivation.

Literature:

1. Becta. (2007). Harnessing technology review 2007: Progress and impact of technology in education: Summary report. Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://publications.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=33980.

2. 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.