Do you need an interactive touch screen? (part 1)

This chap is confident that teaching from the front is a jolly good thing….

I work for a company that manufactures touchscreens. It’s an amazing company and it makes extremely cool technology and I love my job.  It’s a bit of sales, a bit of training, a bit of business development, a bit of technical support and other bits besides.

So why write a blog with a title like this? Because if you ask a school the big existential question: ‘Do you need an interactive touch screen?’ and they say “no”, then that is pretty much the end of the conversation, particularly if they have some good reasons to back this up.  Doesn’t matter how cool your swag is, if a school doesn’t want it, then you’re out of the game.

So why complicate things with this question; surely all schools and all classrooms need interactive touch screens?

The reason for posing the question is twofold.

Firstly quite a few of my formative years were spent doing research into ed-tech and one thing you learn doing research is to question everything. So asking big questions like ‘do you really need an interactive touch screen?’ is a powerful thing to ask in the edtech research space, because it challenges orthodox thinking and forces you to think again about the fundamentals of what ed-tech is meant to achieve. If the answer is ‘we need interactive touch screens because our interactive whiteboards are all old and breaking down’ then more thought is probably needed.

Secondly, on occasions a prospective school or college will ask the question of themselves:  ‘Do we actually need interactive touch screens’.  They do represent a cost, and like any cost it needs justifying. A budget will always outstrip the amount of things it could be spent on, so every purchase is competing with every other, tough decision need to be made.

Answering the question

My instinct when faced with a big question like: ‘Do you need interactive touch screens?’ is to interrogate the teaching strategy of the school or college. What kinds of teaching do you want to see happening? How are teachers to spend the precious time they have with students and which kind of behaviours and practices do you want to promote and which ones do you want to discourage or even proscribe? Once you have an answer for that you can get closer to an honest answer to the question. Now the question of the teachingf strategy is one for Senior Leadership Team (SLT), or at least it should be.  The SLT should work to set the teaching strategy of the school and then put in place the correct support so teaching staff can implement this strategy. An SLT which does not spend a good proportion of its time thinking about teaching and learning and how to improve it, is not doing its job.

Does your teaching strategy include talking to the whole group?

I think it would be very rare for any school or college to have a teaching strategy which did not involve the teacher talking to the whole group, for at least some part of a lesson¹.  This is so basic an assertion that I doubt it gets explicitly covered in teaching strategies, it’s simply a given that the teacher will stand at the front and talk to the class as a whole, at the start of the lesson and once again at the end. So once thjis decision has been made you can ask the question: ‘When the teacher is doing that, how do you want to support them?’ Of course, ut is possible to talk to a group without any audio visual aids. a lot of the most popular TED talks happen on a blank stage with nothing but the speaker and a spotlight. But often teachers need something on the screen, it may be they are setting up group work and need the instructions, or are explaining a concept and need the formulae up  there, or teaching a historical idea and have images and illustration which help.

Once you have decided that it is desirable for a teacher to spend at least some of the lesson addressing the entire class it becomes a necessity to have a screen to display a computer image at a size that all of the participants can see.

So we have got some of the way there.You have at least decided that to support your pedagogic strategy you need a display screen.

In the next blog post, we’ll take a look at whether it needs to be interactive or not.

Footnote

1: It is very easy to imagine a situation where a teacher did not ever address all of the class together. If the classroom is a ‘flipped one’, then the whole class instruction would be created by the teacher and then delivered to the students to access outside of lesson time. So the teacher could make a 10 minute video on the structure of the periodic table, and use a learning environment to deliver this to the students who all watch it individually in their own time.  The classroom time is then devoted to them working through a group or individual activity the teacher sets with the teacher visiting each group or individual and supporting them according to their need. I know of no school where this happens though.

 

Making Sense of Touch Screens

In November I found a new position working at Prowise. Prowise is a manufacturer of interactive touch screens and my job is to help spread the word about just how good Prowise Touch Screens are and the possibilities they create.

When I joined Prowise in many ways I felt like I was coming home; a strange emotion for someone starting at a company but I’d spent so long in the IWB industry that I realised that this is where I do my best work and am happiest. I’d first got up close and personal to an IWB when I won a research contract to evaluate the Whiteboard rollout at St Thomas Aquins School in Edinburgh. A few years later I was tempted into a commercial role and left the hallowed halls of academia.  Joining Prowise and starting at a company that innovates ruthlessly and won’t take second-best in any circumstance is very exhilarating – and just a bit scary.

One of the tasks I set myself over the break, was some in-depth research on the touch screen market, and all the other companies who make touch screens and market them to education.  I’m stupidly nosey which means I love to know what products and services the competition are offering.

This research took quite a chunk of the Christmas break, and I approached it by visiting the websites of all of the main players in the market and really spending time getting to know their solutions and what they thought was good about their kit.  I also spent some time pretending to be a teacher, member of SLT or IT Manager who was trying to make sense of the touch screen market.

1. Would the websites help me make decision?
2. Would I be faced with endless technical jargon and other rubbish?
3. Would I know what to buy and why to buy it?

I knew what I would find before I even started the task; and the results surprised me not one bit.

So here are my conclusions:

1: The market is complicated and opaque.  Making sense of each company’s offering is difficult.  It is easy to get bamboozled by technical jargon, and if that isn’t bad enough, you have to also wade through endless marketing guff distilled into trite phrases such as: ‘breaking down the barriers to communication‘; ‘setting the classroom free‘; ‘touching your better self‘ and so on.  (These are all invented examples of course, but you get the idea!)

2: Most manufacturers have too many product lines which confuses people even more.  Choice is having meaningful decisions to make, rather than being faced with a huge list of “blah, blah blah”.  Often touch screens are divided into ‘corporate’ and ‘education’ models.  Too many times this is the identical touch screen, just bundled with different software. Often you pay more for the corporate model which means you are shelling out hard-earned cash for some second rate software which in other circumstances the manufacturer couldn’t give away for free. I’m no business guru, but my feeling is that post-2008 companies are equally as careful with how they spend their money as schools, so why rip them off? Some manufacturer’s models differ by just a single number e.g. EF-455B and EF455B2 but are quite different (HD versus 4K for instance).

3: Software is a huge problem.  Software is needed to get the most out of any touch screen solution, I knew that even as a young and foolish researcher in a windswept Edinburgh in 2003, but so many manufacturers do not let you trial their software, so you have to wait until you are a customer or get a demo. This is not good; if the software is as good as you think it is, then let people try it out for themselves. If you are going to charge extra for software then this is a perfectly logical business model, but you need to let people browsing your website know this sooner rather than later. They will be putting together a budget for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for this stuff!!

4:  People will easily get confused about whether the boards come with a mainboard or not. The trend is for manufacturers to add a basic Android computer or similar mini-PC-thingy to a screen so that you can switch it on and get access to features such as whiteboarding or even browsing without the need to connect a PC. Whether the screen had a mainboard or not and what it could do was clear on only a handful of manufacturer’s websites.  This is not a minor thing, being able to use the screen without a PC could be crucial for what you need the screen for.

I ended up with a 35 page document of my findings.  But the 4 points above are a fair distillation of what I found.  Maybe I approached the exercise in too cynical a frame of mind? Perhaps I’m just an old ed-tech lag hankering after days of simplicity which are long gone?

And Prowise? Where does Prowise fit into this….

Let’s look back at the 4 points:

1: Complex and Opaque
Prowise put the most important information on a single web page so you can compare the boards easily.  If you want more technical information to feed your inner geek we can give that to you until your eyes roll back in your head, but when you are looking for the salient points you get them. Simple

2: Complex Product Lines
Prowise have just 2 product lines, EntryLine and Proline+
The product line names explain what the products are. All screens are 4k. EntryLine screen sizes are:  65, 75, 86, Proline+  are: 65 and 75. Simple.

3: Inacccessible software
Prowise boards come with Prowise Presenter software.  This is cloud-based whiteboarding software and we offer a free account to everyone, whether the school has a Prowise Screen or not.  You can click the button at the top right of the Prowise.com site to create your free account. This is full access to all features of Presenter, nothing locked or disabled.  So you can try our software out to see if it works for you on any screen. Simple.

4. Mainboard or not?
Prowise boards (EntryLine and Proline+) come with Prowise Central pre-loaded, this is a mainboard running Android. This means you can start the screen with no PC and get whiteboarding.  Want to save your stuff?  Save it to the mainboard memory or take a snapshot of a QR code with your phone and it transfer there immediately.  Need to check something out online? A browser is included.  Want to change source because you finally decided to plug your laptop in? Just select the source from the OnScreen menu and off you go.  Launch Prowise Central by placing your 5 fingers on the screen. Do what you need to do, then dismiss it. Simple.

It. Is. That. Simple.

If want to see what Prowise can do for your school then we’ll come and do a demo for you.
Just don’t expect us to ‘touch your better self’ 😉

 

 

 

iPads do not have magic learning dust coming out of the back vent

“The iPad is just a neat tablet computer, it does not have magic learning dust coming out of the back vent” was a tweet I sent yesterday and which I wanted to follow up with a more substantive post. Being an avid twitter kind-of person, I read quite a few tweets about the iPad in education and teachers eager to introduce these to their classrooms, and it was one of these which pushed me into the mini-rant you see encapsulated above.

This is in no way an anti-iPad posting (although I imagine some will interpret it as such), it is simply a request that as educators we assess the potential of the iPad in an objective manner and learn some lessons from great education technologies of the past which promised a great deal and delivered somewhat less.

First of all, let’s start by praising the iPad and Apple’s legendary focus on usability to create iOS (the operating system which powers the iPad and the iPhone). I grew up programming in basic (I’m looking at you Clive Sinclair), graduated to strange prompt based operating system and strange winking cursors at DOS prompts, before beholding the first colour computers (an RM Nimbus in my mum’s classroom) and then machines running Windows (but never forgetting those DOS skills, because Windows was always a huge pack of cards built on top of DOS), a breath of wind in the wrong direction and you were back to C:/ and a sense that the computer was having so much more fun than you were.

So basically old gits like me have grown up accustomed to having to cajole and curse (in equal measure) our computers to get them to do ‘stuff’. Computing was never meant to be easy, it was like hand-cranking a Ford Model T, it took lots of practice, it often did not work, and the likelihood of injury was high.  When you give an iPad to someone like me, it’s like smashcutting the cave painters of Lascaux into the centre of the Sistine Chapel; their mouths hanging open in wonder as they behold their humble tools transformed into a heady display of celestial beauty. I cannot believe how easy it is to do stuff on the iPad and how the Operating System seems to anticipate so much of what you want to do. The video at the top of this blog is my daughter who is able to unlock the iPad, start YouTube, go to history and choose her favourite videos. She is 2 and a half years old. And she’s never had a single iPad lesson in her life.

All of this usability (whether you are 2.5 or 42) makes the device very productive in a range of contexts, from taking notes in a meeting, to tweeting in front of the telly, to doing some basic video editing, to writing this blog (albeit with a grown-up keyboard bluetoothed to it). The iPad is shiny and sexy and desirable and it carries that heady promise through into the user experience and there is little wonder that some teachers have been seduced by it and speculated about the impact it could have in the classroom.

But of course the fetishisation of technologies which are new on the scene  is a recurrent theme in education technology.  When the first CD-ROMs came out (the ones which needed a ‘caddy’), there was much hype about how they could transform learning.  Suddenly a single Microsoft Encarta disc could bring an entire encyclopedia to your computer screen with multimedia (sound and pictures in old money) to boot.  Surely the kids would start learning now the theory went, what can hold them back, with these resources at their fingertips they’ll be surging ahead, what could possibly stop them? If you  wind back time to the advent of educational television you would see similar sentiments being expressed about this.  In fact you can take any new technology device and see that it will be hyped as heralding a learning revolution. The same was true of the hype around Interactive Whiteboards during their first wave of implementation in British schools.

Hype is not necessarily a bad thing though, it’s just that the temptation exists to fetishise a new technology as providing all the answers to the learning problems we face.  But once the honeymoon is over and the incredible promise is not delivered, we often turn away from that technology and seek the next big thing. But part of the hype is normally always justified, the technology does indeed have transformative potential, the trick is sticking with that particular technology and extracting maximum benefit from its residual potential. A case in point is the interactive whiteboard.  Originally hyped to a point where the technology could never cash the cheques which the advocates were writing, the IWB is now a device which is extremely useful in teaching, with the right training for the teacher and pedagogical vision of how to use it. And if you disagree with this and think the iPad is a credible replacement for the IWB, then I’ll come and do a teach-off with you, me on the IWB, you on the iPad!

So here’s the thing. If you put iPads into your classroom expecting them to be magical learning devices, then prepare for disappointment; there is no magical learning dust. The only magical device in a classroom is the teacher whose imagination can create new pedagogies and the students who can enter into these pedagogies and make them work. And if you think iPads are magical learning devices, also be prepared, after the bitter recriminations about why they did not work,  to be seduced by the next big shiny thing coming over the horizon.

Technologies do not create learning revolutions, pedagogies do. And developing pedagogies is difficult, painstaking work.  Pedagogy is not a silver slimline minimalist shiny device in a cool case, ‘designed in Cupertino’; it is rather a messy, headscratching, ‘one step forward, one step back’ kind of a process which you have to inhabit, live with and work through.  Create a transformational pedagogy for your classroom and you’ll be able to sprinkle magical learning dust on just about any technology you give to your students.

NB: I know that technically the iPad does not have any back vents, as it cools via a heat sink rather than direct air circulation. But the tweet which initiated this posting was kind of ‘off the cuff’ and technical accuracy was sacrificed for twitter brevity!

Reports of the death of the whiteboard are much exaggerated..

Is the whiteboard really dead?

It has become quite fashionable for pronouncements such as ‘the interactive whiteboard is dead’, or ‘IWBs are old technology’ or variants on that theme to be made recently. Blog postings are being written about how other technologies have supplanted the IWB as the classroom technology of choice for teachers. Those who have foretold the death of the interactive whiteboard are often keen to explain how other technologies are replacing it, such as iPads, netbooks or other devices which have caught the imagination of educators.

But the death of the whiteboard is greatly exaggerated for the following reasons:

1: Having an IWB in your classroom is about having a platform for content. Teachers need software to assemble content for lessons and increasingly this content is multimedia in nature with the need to integrate text, images, video, audio and flash type content.  The major IWB players provide teachers with that software and it is optimised for teaching.  Many teachers, particularly in secondary use PowerPoint, but this is not the same. PowerPoint has a different paradigm to a piece of software such as SMART’s NOTEBOOK, it forces you to design your content first and then present it.  It can lead to lessons where slide after slide of information is presented and the teacher does little manipulation of that content. Of course PowerPoint does not dictate this kind of paradigm, it is possible to use PowerPoint in very creative ways, although this is not something I have seen often in UK classrooms. It is precisely the manipulation of the content which is important when teaching. So take the IWB out of the classroom and you take the software out too, and if that means more teachers use PowerPoint because that’s the only thing suitable they have to hand for their slide stacks, then that’s not solving a problem, that’s making a bigger one, and creating a big hole in the teacher toolkit which will be expensive and complicated to fill later on.

2: IWB antagonists often cast this technology as forcing teachers into a ‘transmission based, teaching from the front pedagogy’. In fact one of my followers on twitter bemoaned the fact that the IWB was keeping pupils sitting on the carpet looking at the front too much. My comeback to that tweet was fairly easy to write, it’s not the board which is doing the “from the front teaching, it’s the teacher (DOH)”; don’t blame a technology for a teacher behaviour. Instead address the root cause of why a teacher allows a particular instructional practice to dominate and then find a way for the  technology to serve pedagogical practice rather than driving it.  Great teachers assemble their lessons using a variety of methods and techniques and they also vary how they organise the class, their time and the resources (both technological and human) available to them. They probably teach from the front for some of the time, and the IWB is an essential tool for those sections of the lesson. Without it there is no focus for the class, no sense of a shared space to create meaning and set tasks, nowhere for the class to come back at the end of a learning session and review what has been achieved, nowhere for the students to come and present to the rest of class. However great teachers do not allow from the front teaching to dominate; they set individual, pair and group work, skilfully orchestrating resources and using detailed knowledge of the class to create the conditions for learning without direct instruction from the teacher.  Perhaps in the early days of IWBs, teachers were so enamoured of what the technology could do that they overused them. As the saying goes, ‘to someone with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail’. But to repeat my point, IWBs can never be held responsible for the pedagogy in a classroom, teachers have to answer for that.  After all, the police don’t prosecute cars for driving badly, they prosecute the drivers. We don’t applaud the piano at a concert, we applaud the pianist.

3: In the UK there has been a massive investment in IWB technology, and ripping this out and replacing it with something else is wasteful, prodigal even.  Schools should concentrate instead on getting the most out of the technology they already own. I have visited many schools and worked with lots of teachers during my time working with a major IWB manufacturer, and I have found only a handful who use the technology to its maximum capability. Unfortunately most only use 10% perhaps or  less of the features.  This is not normally the individual teacher’s fault, it was a systemic failure to address training and professional development when the boards were first going into UK classrooms. It is a mistake being repeated in some BSF and Academy projects where professional development for teachers drops off the bottom of the list.  But senior managers in schools need to grasp this issue. They need to make it their business to understand the technology which their teachers have to teach with, and then invest (both internally and externally) to maximise the usage of this technology. They need to find courses and providers which set the technology usage in an overall pedagogical context and set clear expectations of the kinds of teaching which they want to see in their school, and then fund the necessary investment to give teachers the tools to do this.

So to conclude, ripping out interactive whiteboards and giving every student in the class an iPad or netbook won’t fix education anymore than putting the IWB into the classroom 6-8 years ago was going to fix education. We need to start every conversation about teaching with how we develop and empower teachers to marry technology usage and appropriate pedagogy, and we don’t need conversations which focus on a particular piece of equipment in isolation, as if somehow the technology itself has a magic power to orchestrate teaching and learning. Technologies do not have this power. Only teachers have this power.  Let’s focus on pedagogy rather than technology.

Whiteboard hardware battles, what do they mean?

Merlin John’s website has a review by Chris Drage of the new Promethean 500 Pro Series Interactive Whiteboard.

Now the review is thorough and does a good job of evaluating the technical capabilities of Promethean’s new offering. Although the reasons Promethean decided to call it the ‘pro’ board are somewhat puzzling, unless of course they are going to rebadge their existing boards as amateur, which seems unlikely.

So the review is a sound piece of work. The reason I have decided to write this is that once again the education community is in danger of missing the point when it comes to Interactive Whiteboards. The point was missed first time around when the boards were seen as a vehicle to present flash (often literally) pre-prepared content from publishers rather than as part of a toolkit which a teacher could use to create a learning space. Currently the IWB manufacturers are moving further into the multi-touch and multi-user world with the new 800 series by SMART offering multi touch gestures and 2 users working simultaneously within the software (with either touch or pens).  This indicates a potential arms race as all of the manufacturers work to add as many touch points as they can to their boards to entice buyers and outdo the competition.  But the real pedagogical issue at stake here is definitely not about the number of users or touches, it’s about what you do with the users or touches, in education terms, once you have them.

Promethean are currently celebrating their 4 touch points, but I’ve not seen much in the review or in the promotional literature which makes a proper evidence based case for why having 4 students interacting on the board is going to make a substantial difference to learning outcomes.  Let’s start with the question of what they students will be doing; just what activity are they pursuing? It is true that any experienced Activinspire user worth their salt could create some drag and drop games or magic paper type activities and having more than one student being able to work on these at any one time does present some limited advantages over single touch boards.  But if you can find me a teacher who is going to use this feature regularly (say once a day minimum) and purposely set out to design activities to take advantage of this functionality, then I would be extremely surprised. No correction, I’d not be surprised I’d just not believe you and honestly, I don’t think teachers will use these features. They may be more likely to use them in Primary but I don’t see many secondary lessons designed so 4 students are at the front interacting with the board.  What do the rest of the group do during this time, they can’t watch the students working on the board because a line of kids blocks out the image, so just how does the teacher create a pedagogical design to exploit this function and balance it with teaching the rest of the group. By way of explanation of this point, find me a teacher who can currently use the Promethean or SMART software to even 60% of its full potential and I’m quite surprised, expecting them to use this technology to its full is not realistic so once again we have the potential for a gimmick which looks great at BETT, enticing in the sales literature, and is of zero use in the classroom.

Interactive Whiteboards as a category of technology have been coming in for quite a bit of criticism lately, and were described by one speaker at the NAACE conference in March as ‘an outdated technology’ as if they really are due for the scrap heap (once all the relevant WEEE directives have been settled of course). But contrary to what I have written above I believe that an Interactive Whiteboard is essential for any teacher, for reasons which do not live in the hardware itself (hence hardware advancements are not that important), but are all to do with the software. The major manufacturers have worked hard on their software, perceiving correctly that amongst discerning users this is what can give them the edge on the competition. And the result are software platforms which are very well suited to the kinds of work which teachers do (because only good suggestions from teachers made it into the features of the software). In particular the software allows for the rapid and easy aggregation of data and multimedia from various sources so a lesson does not need to be completely prepared in advance and delivered without deviation from the script as so often happens when PowerPoint is used in classrooms.  Good whiteboard software allows teachers to extemporise, even wing it a bit, pick up on interesting avenues and explore them, drag resources from the net in real time, and crucially create a shared meaning on the board as some parts of the lesson are created in front of the class.  Take the board away and you take the software away and the teacher then falls back on the woefully inadequate features of PowerPoint and their whole approach to lesson planning is strait jacketed by a software designed for business presentations rather than teaching.

So advances in hardware are not exactly unwelcome and there is bound to be further innovation, but the new shiny hardware is no way as important as it seems. Until more teachers use the software and the boards fully, then extra functionality is wasted.  Think of a racing driver driving regularly at the limits of his or her car who is then handed a improved car with better suspension, better brakes and a slightly more powerful engine. They will immediately record better laptimes and soon push that new model to its limits. But put that car in the hands of someone who drives only occasionally and they would not exploit its full power because of their lack of mastery of any previous models. Unfortunately with whiteboards in the UK, many teachers are Sunday drivers or never get their cars out of the garage..  True advancements in IWB usage will come from CPD to get teachers exploiting the technology to its full potential.

“Web Cam on a stick”: talking with teachers about technology

I spent a few sessions this week at a technology showcase for a BSF programme. These are events where the IT partner brings in various manufacturers of technology and allows the teachers and management of the school to learn more about them. The end of the process should be where the teachers choose which technology they get for their new school, but that is a lot more complicated than it sounds.

One of the interesting things about these events is the way the representatives from the manufacturers talk to the teachers about the technology. I’ve been doing this (from the manufacturer side) for 4 years now, and still find it hard to decide where to pitch my spiel.  Setting off at breakneck pace with a list of all the brilliant features of the gizmo is definitely not the way to go, I have at least learned that.  I start a conversation or presentation now by asking the teacher(s) what kinds of technology they have in their classroom and how they use it. This question acts as a quick diagnostic tool, particularly when dealing with teachers who already use technology effectively, as they find it easy to answer because they are describing an aspect of their practice which has become part of the routine. However it is rare to get an answer which is much more than ‘I have an interactive whiteboard and I use it to show PowerPoints’.  Of course there are teachers out there doing wonderful creative things with the technology in their classroom, but many, for reasons which will have to wait for future postings, simply don’t use the technology they already have to anything like its full potential.

Faced with teachers who may be seeing technology such as an interactive whiteboard used to its full potential, or a classroom response system, or a visualiser, many representatives fall back on some rather clumsy explanations for what these weird and wonderful artefacts are.  Here are some highlights

web cam on a stick translation: visualiser
who wants to be a millionaire translation: classroom response system
giant iPad translation: interactive whiteboard or touch panel

These clumsy approximations of the technology mask a greater problem that manufacturers have in talking about their products to teachers. Namely that they just have to start the conversation with the product. Better conversations can be achieved if you outline an issue and see if the teacher has this particular issue. So if I am talking about a web cam on a stick (sorry Visualiser), I now ask the teacher, ‘when teaching do you get frustrated because you want to the students to see things close up’. This is still probably a leading question, but at least it sets a context where teaching and pedagogy are somewhere in the mix.  The teacher is more likely to respond with questions about what the technology can do and how it can be integrated into their classroom practice if the initial conversation is framed in these terms.

Ultimately matching the right technology to teachers should be a two way process, the manufacturers need to listen more and be less eager to foist technical details and patronising metaphors on the audience, and the teachers need to be more critical, more engaged and more ready to question the pedagogical benefits of what is being showcased.