Day 2: Simulations and Senior Teachers

The next day, the teachers arrived just as early, the buzz from the day before still ringing around the school courtyard, as they discussed the difficulties of the set-up and the potential for this tool in the classroom. We started the day with a screen-mounting relay race, and then a technology review, before continuing our explanation of the IWB set-up. We walked the teachers through the process, step by step, from linking the technological pieces all together with cords and Bluetooth, to starting the software, to using the infrared marker to navigate the screen.

There was visible frustration in the eyes of the older teachers, as they recognized the utility of the IWB but struggled to master its set-up. In discussion sessions, they were the first to bring up pedagogical concerns, shying away from confronting the technology, even in words. The saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” kept surfacing in my mind. Could we succeed in integrating a one-year-old tool into the classroom of a man who has been teaching for 35 years?

The senior teachers found their feet again when the morning class simulation started. Saliou was to lead a lesson, at the first-grade level, on spatial awareness and lateralization, to illustrate the integration of the IWB into geography lessons. To make the simulation more interesting and less passive for the teachers, they were each handed a student role card and instructed to play this part during the simulation. Roles varied from “talkative student” to “student who reacts without thinking” to “disengaged student” and even to “student with artistic tendancies.” After seeing and working with these types of students for years, if not decades, each teacher-turned-student played his role earnestly, and the simulation classroom quickly became a real-life challenge for trainer-turned-teacher Saliou!

Still, he was able to both manage the classroom and lead his activities. He started with physical body exercises and movement, staying away from the board and working with the students and the classroom space itself. Then, he moved on to spatial recognition on the IWB with drag-and-drop images, and then to the exploitation of a photo of himself, first back to the camera and then front, asking students to identify his left arm, right ear, etc. He wrapped up the lesson with a review, using a geography workbook page that had been scanned and projected for group completion – given the inexistence of hard copies in this, and just about any, classroom.

The afternoon consisted of workshops on integrating the IWB into each discipline, given its possibilities and limits. The teams were asked to explore the IWB further on their own and propose ways in which it could facilitate curriculum lessons, such as using scanned workbook pages, playing available math or science games as a class, annotating texts together, discussing images, etc. The discussions were rich with ideas, but the question that kept surfacing quietly was “do I really have to use this tool for that?” As any teacher presented with a new tool, they had difficulties discerning when the tool was helpful and when it was a burden. It is exactly this difficulty that often causes teachers to try their hardest to integrate, but then to quickly abandon the tool, discouraged, when it proves to be much more work and have much more limits than their plain old blackboard or paper and pencil. I was eager to open up this discussion, but would have to wait a little longer until all the teachers realized for themselves this limitation of IWB integration.

We ended this second day with an assignment. Given that one of the most basic uses of the IWB is to project images, for annotation or discussion, it was crucial that we know exactly what types of images would be most helpful for the teachers. So, we asked one group to work on creating an image “wishlist,” all of the images they would hope to have at their disposal, mostly from pop culture, to use in their classrooms. The other group was given a digital camera and told to gather images from the students’ daily lives that would be helpful to use in the classroom. Exhausted yet again, but already flashing the camera constantly, the teachers headed home to recuperate and to work on their homework.