Skip to main content

Death knell for Interactive WhiteBoards?

A thoughtful writer comes up with explanations for Interactive WhiteBoards' tepid success in helping students, and great success in selling product to administrators.  Lesson: now sell your stock in Promethean.

Check out this article on Edsurge, by J.Orbaugh.

As much as I have loved using Interactive WhiteBoards in the classroom, their cost seems quite disproportionate to the benefit in most classrooms.   In most cases, a simpler technology that allows the computer to track gross pointer movement onscreen would be sufficient.   The extra software control requires so much investment in training -- and adjusting lesson plans -- that few teachers use it, and few administrators allocate the training time and administrative attention to get it used.
Again we return to my basic assumption: administrator attention is where things happen.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Kite Runner is with us again

 Six or so years ago, I taught The Kite Runner to three successive sets of tenth-graders, and marveled at the effect the novel had on me and on these adolescents.  That age is a marvelous time for a humanities teacher, as we see callous children grow out of their self-centered cocoons and flex their world-empathic feelers.  They grow into the world outside them and realize they truly have agency -- or will have agency and responsibility for human actions.  Amir, the main protagonist of Kite Runner is so identifiable with those adolescents learning to take responsibility for their callous actions.   And of course we think of Kite Runner now that Afghanistan once again plunges into Taliban rule -- we particularly worry about the fate of the Hazara (news stories already cite random executions of Hazara men).   We can only wring hands and pray that the Taliban will have to adapt and tolerate more than they did before -- but I am not optimistic. ...

Review: Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World by James Carroll My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fascinating comprehensive worldview, with Jesuitical logic in a broad sweep that links religion in a circular way to violence and the solution to violence. The author shows a great command of history and religion, with extensive endnotes to support or expand upon most of his claims; however, some sweeping indictments will certainly be resisted by the more fundamentalist People Of The Book (that is, the Abrahamic religions). A core symbolic thread is Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac on Mt.Moriah, the supposed site later called Jerusalem -- the author deftly cites that scene throughout the many centuries since the original event, demonstrating the human tendency to misinterpret that near-sacrifice in order to rationalize our own tendency to violence and scapegoating. I started the book in audio form, but found it unlistenable -- the author's c...

Review: The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917

The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 by Philip D. Zelikow My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews