Wednesday, March 31, 2010

A first for West Africa! Beta testing our interactive whiteboard


There was excitement beyond belief when Saliou, our IWB pedagogical consultant, and I began to mount the screen in the principal’s office at Cheikh Mbaba Sow Elementary School in Mbour. The students were switching around between their daily classroom setting and another class, since the one outlet in their normal classroom was not working. After snapping on the last few bungee cords, Saliou called for two boys to carry the board over. They marched it across the sandy courtyard, in all its PVC and nylon glory, up the crumbling step to the new classroom, and in through the door. At the sight of this novel contraption, all the chatter in the class stopped. The 52 pairs of first grader eyes fixed on the mounted screen, not knowing what to anticipate next but certainly eager to find out.

“Bonjour les enfants!” Saliou announced, stepping into the room just after the screen entered. The students stood up, craned their necks to look at the 2+ meter man in front of them, and responded in unison “Bonjour madame” – the simple presence of a male visitor was already an unexpected change from the daily routine of this class, led by Madame Ba, a small, gentle teacher in her first year of teaching.

“Bonjour monsieur!” she called out from the back, and the children understood.

“Bonjour monsieur!” they called again, and then stopped when I entered. They were out of greetings, not sure what was appropriate for this pants-donning, fair-skinned person. They sat down, with the gentle thud thud thud of well-behaved students, and waited.

In the meantime, I had already rushed to the back of the screen with Saliou and was putting together the projector, Wiimote, and computer. A good 3 minutes later, and we were calibrating the screen, and then ready to start! I took my seat at the back of the class, along with the principal, the two first-grade teachers, and the two second-grade teachers, and waited for Saliou to start this history-making lesson.

When he asked the students to take out their counting sticks (whittled sticks from branches), the teachers’ excitement, building nervously until that moment, subsided. Why is he using sticks when there’s some colorful new machine? they seemed to ask themselves. Still, they watched attentively as he began his lesson , “Discovery of the number 11.”

After a few minutes lost to students’ shuffling their materials around, there were 52 - rather, 51 sets of counting materials in front of them on their table-benches: some had sticks, others soda caps or water bottle tops, and a few had large white gravel pieces. One confused girl up front hunched over her neighbor’s bottle tops, her set of counting materials missing.

“Who can count to 10 for me?” Saliou asked, and all hands shot up in the air. “Madame, madame!” we heard again, as each child vied for the attention of the teacher, and hoped to be called upon to answer. He finally chose a timid girl in the corner, who counted her sticks one by one until she got to 10.

“Who else?” Saliou called, and the activity repeated itself. “Who can add two piles of sticks to get 10?” he requested, and again the hands shot up, waiting impatiently to be called upon. A boy up front divided his sticks between two hands, and then counted each one as he set them down lightly on the table space in front of him.

“Now, what if you had 10 sticks in one hand, and 1 stick in the other? How many would you have?” The children, already familiar with the number 11, responded in unison. From there, it was on to the semi-concrete phase, where 11 marks were drawn on each student’s small chalkboard, 10 circled together and then 1 circled next to it, the numbers were combined with the help of “number tags” under the circles. Classic teaching, classic materials, classic responses.

Then it was time to continue with the lesson, but now with the help of the interactive whiteboard.

Saliou took out an infrared marker, changed deftly to a blank annotation page, and wrote the number “8” on the screen in red. The children were amazed – and the teachers sitting next to me were as silent and speechless as if we’d just told them that we possess the ultimate secret to entering heaven. Saliou clicked on the eraser, erased his “8” with some deft sweeps of the marker, and then wrote it again.

“Now,” he pronounced quietly, “who would like to try?” Unlike before, the childrens’ hands stayed frozen in their laps or on the tables. They didn’t quite know what to make of this ghostwriting on a sheet. It looked like a television, but surely, you can’t write on the television, can you?

Slowly, a few hands were raised tentatively, about as many girls as boys, and Saliou chose little Mariama to come up.

“You hold the marker like this,” he explained, his giant hands overshadowing her miniature models as they held the marker together, “and then you touch this little red button when you want to start writing. When you’re done writing, you take your finger off the button.”

With Saliou’s hand still around hers, Mariama had enough confidence to try out this crazy new tool, and quickly circled the pen around to write a big red “8” on the board. Smiling, she shuffled her hand away, and went to sit down. Fifty-one pairs of eyes followed her, waiting to see what was next.

“Who else would like to try to write?” Saliou extended his second magical invitation. A few more hands went up before he chose a boy in a small, man-like boubou, who strutted up to the board and took charge of the marker. He raised himself on his tiptoes, but still barely made it to the bottom of the screen. Reaching high, and still not quite sure of the button, he made his “8” but then didn’t release, and a streak of red followed his hand as he lowered it. The class howled in amusement – that can’t be a number 8!

But, with two more tries, these unassisted, the children felt much more confident already, mastering as a group this crazy new blackboard, and so Saliou continued his lesson. As a trial, he opened the MathTrek 123 software to a preschool-level game called “Kittens Pleasure,” featuring toy store shelves filled with toy kittens. The object of the game was to take the kittens, one by one, from the shelves, to fill a box below with the number of kittens indicated. This would require for these 1st grade students, who have never used a computer before, to drag-and-drop objects on the screen. Could they do that?

After a simple explanation from Saliou – “hold the button down until the kitten is in the box, and then release” - the first participant was chosen and skipped up to the board. She confidently took the marker, and began hastily to drag-and-drop kittens from the shelf into the box, until she had quite a few more kittens than necessary! After another simple explanation, she began carefully drag-dropping kittens back on the shelf, and, with a cue from a classmate, clicked on the “Done” button on top.

“Congratulations!” the computerized bear game host proclaimed. “You’ve done a great job!” The students were excited – the bear congratulated them! As the game round came to a close with the kittens meowing and frolicking off the screen, the children laughed quietly and waited eagerly, almost twitching, to see what they would do next.

And the lesson continued with just as much ease and excitement. A PowerPoint slide with an incomplete number line was completed by students, a drag-and-drop activity putting stick symbols in circles was quickly understood and completed without error, and one last game of “Let’s Go Fishing” ended this digitized numerical lesson – the FIRST introduction of an interactive whiteboard in a West African elementary school outside of Dakar.

As the students filed out, each one jumping over the extension cord, the teachers stood up and cautiously approached the interactive whiteboard. “Can we really do this?” they asked. So we showed them, as we had done the children, how to hold the infrared pen and push the button, and soon they were doodling on the annotation board like inner-city taggers!

“Wow,” they breathed in unison. “We need to learn more.”