Hands-On Experience: Interactive Devices Can Inspire Student Collaboration-But Only When Coupled with Inspired Teaching

This is the third in a six-pert monthly series examining how different technologies can help schools enhance collaboration among students. Previous installments have covered social media and configurable furniture. Here, we look at a variety of interactive devices and how teachers are using them to create a collaborative environment. Beth Holland has a love/hate relationship with interactive whiteboards (IWBs). feel that they tend to force teachers into a traditional model of standing up in front of the room as the focal point, says the former director of academic technology at St. Michael's Country Day School in Newport, RI. try to work with teachers on how the whiteboard can be a launching pad for other activities and support digital collaborations, says Holland, now a senior associate with consulting firm EdTechTeacher in Chestnut Hill, MA. Holland stresses that before districts invest in new devices, teachers must first define the learning environment they am Wing to create and specify how the devices fit into that plan. Otherwise those devices may end up gathering dust in the corner of the classroom. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Greg Kulowiec, Holland's colleague, is a former social studies teacher and technology integration specialist. He recalls that, as a teacher, he always tried to make sure the whiteboard was contributing to the interactive nature of the classroom, even if only one student was at the board at a time. Just having that visual component and having the student use it as a way to start thinking, and then verbally defending their decision, gets the other students involved, he says. what is happening on the whiteboard is not the real focal point end end result, but instead the jumping-off point of the conversation. So how are other teachers and instructional technologists working to ensure that introducing new devices enhances collaboration? Putting the I in IWB a teacher In the Washington, DC, Public Schools, Pamela Levine spent a good deal of time thinking about how she can use interactive whiteboards to their full potential. As they come out of the box, IWBs don't necessarily lend themselves to collaboration. It depends on how you use them, says Levine, now an instructional technology associate in the Stanford Graduate School of Education in California. The main strength of IWBs, she says, is that they allow you to display content with interactive materials such as New York Times maps or content from the BBC or the History Channel. Educational maps and data displayed on the whiteboard are open to manipulation, which can leverage student excitement. An elementary school teacher using an IWB in a whole-group setting, though, can only get one or two students at the whiteboard at a time. didn't use that approach often, because the other students tend to get bored quickly, Levine says. More often, she used the IWB as a class center, with four students assigned to it while she walked around working with other students in class. liked to assign roles of a team to all four in that group, with each rote contributing to the learning objective, she says. For instance, in a reading activity with projectable books with interactive content, one student can take on the role of researcher (perhaps looking up outside resources on a computer); one can focus on vocabulary words; and another can be the synthesizer of ideas. Part of their assignment becomes learning how to synthesize their contributions, Levine says. Perry Rentz, an eighth-grade English teacher at Cass Middle School in Bartow County, GA, says that using PolyVision's Eno Click IWB has made grammar and writing exercises more engaging for his students. For example, in some of his classes all the students have MacBooks. They work on essays individually, then they AirDrop them to his MacBook to be projected and annotated on screen. Because each student's work gets group feedback, the students are much more attentive, Rentz says. …