IWB Conference, Auckland, Day 1 and 2 : Best of the rest

The second IWB conference here over the past 3 days did not for me have the same impact as last years' conference. That's not to say it was poor - it just seemed to me that it was possibly a little smaller than last year and the trade show was a little smaller ... And perhaps there were not for me as many stand out sessions as there were last year.

That said - yes I got some value out of it and here are some of the highlights for me.

Craig and Tania Lineham are a husband and wife team from James Hargest College at the bottom of the South Island. They gave a thoughtful presentation about how they are charged with training and support of teachers in their school, and then they both had separate sessions - Tania is Head of Science and Craig head of Health and PE. More about Craig's session later.

In this joint session they shared their observation chart they use when they drop in to asses how their whiteboards are being used in class - accountability it would seem is alive and well in their school. They run drop in sessions each Wednesday after school for staff too - we used to do this several years ago but stopped it due to lack of interest - they say sometimes they have no one turn up, but they still offer them.

They are big on Blooms revised taxonomy - good to see that a school has a clearly identified pedagogy and that it keeps coming up in what they do.

I can't help but think that so much of what these guys are showing reflects the buy in that their school has - it's clear that their school has a culture of learning that their staff share.

I attended several sessions that were specific to Promethean's ActiveBoard - the software that comes with their boards. In reality there seems little difference between this software and Smart NoteBook. Perhaps the ActiveInspire software interface is a little more cluttered?

Without question the highlight for me was the session Craig Lineham, HOD Health and PE from James Hargest High School. His session had little to do with interactive whiteboards and more to do with ICT in health and physical education in general. For a great example of using technologies in PE, he was inspiring. Some of his ideas...

1. Orienteering - students create the courses they taken their cell phones with them and photograph evidence that they had actually done the course - they show the photos to their peers when they return as proof that they did the course.

2. VisibleBody.com have a great subscription based web service for anatomy - $20 per license for 6 months.

3. They use MentalCase to create flash cards for student cell phones - then key messages they want students to learn they save as a series of jpg files.

4. Mindjet Mind Manager Pro for mind mapping.

Overall comments:

1. there are a lot of activities that you can do well on an iwb but that take time - a lot of time - to develop. But as Craig Lineham has said though - it is an investment. An investment in the future.

2. One nagging thing - the term interactive whiteboard used to refer to the fact that to use the board you had to interact with it. More and more over the past year or so I hear that the interactive part comes from the way that a "well used" board promotes interactivity within the students in the classroom overall. I can't help but think is this true, or is this a way of deflecting the fact that maybe these boards don't deliver everything they promised in an interactive way?

3. Not withstanding what I said in 2), put a tool like an IWB in the hands of an already good teacher, then they will do some pretty amazing things with it.

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IWB Conference, Auckland, Day 1: Setting the Scene

Here are my notes from the sessions I attended today.

Keynote 1

Delivered by Peter Kent from Australia. Before a few of Peter's comments, one from the Prinicipal of host school Westlake Girls ... "Remember that we were all there once"... Alison Goernhoffer in reference to new entrants into the tech workplace. Worth remembering - not everyone comes to the classroom with all of the skills they might want to have as far as digital technology is concerned ... To this you can add pedagogy and practise too!

From Peter's talk, I guess the prime message he was giving ... "If you try and teach without technology ... it's a fools errand - you won't be successful."

Do I agree with this? Like everything ... It needs to be taken in context. John Hattie's research doesn't necessarily support this if you take it at just face value, but if you dig deeper ... What Pete is saying (I think) is that there has never been the array of tools for teachers to make teaching such a compelling thing to do as there are now - and of course this is only increasing at a rapid rate. Kids are growing up with this stuff, so we'd better join in.

Pete points to UK Research that struggles to find a relationship between technology spend and use and student outcomes. He cites the BECTA (RIP) research between 2000 & 2007 to support this. But why would we expect otherwise is my question. We have these terrific tools and the web, so called 21st Century tools, but we bring an assessment regime steeped in the industrial model to our classrooms still and to be fair in secondary classrooms we still teach to this assessment regime - so why would we expect anything different?

Hattie says good teaching makes a difference and his research shows that feedback (relationships and opportunity for reflection are included in this I guess) is high on the agenda of good things. But how many of us use the technologies available to us to better facilitate these fundamental things?

"Success is not always strategic" - I can vouch for that I'm sure!


Pete's final words ..."As a teaching professional - what is our responsibility?
We have the tools that no other teacher has had before ...."

So that's the keynote - some food for thought - nothing really new here - but always good to hear that we're on the right track.


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