The process of teacher training and preparation of a lesson, which leverages IWB-specific affordances for student kinesthetic engagement (Gregorcic 2015). The context where the study took place, in particular, the established practice and culture of IWB use in physics instruction. We studied in what ways the teacher and students perceived these materials’ potential for teaching and learning in physics and in what way the proposed instructional activities differed from what usually happens in physics lessons. This study follows one of the two teachers, as she learned to use the new materials and implemented them in her teaching. To help the teachers advance their use of the IWB, we introduced them to teaching materials that they could apply in their classrooms. At the same time, two teachers expressed a sincere interest in learning more about the ways that IWB technology could be used to foster a student-engaging learning environment that would also take advantage of the IWB’s unique affordances. We found that one of the reasons was that physics teachers lacked ideas concerning using the IWB in a more advanced way, both technically (they mostly used it as an ordinary board, for writing and drawing) and pedagogically, support student-centered activities in their classes. We found that in spite of having good mastery of the technical aspects of IWB use and using some of its features productively, the transition from ordinary whiteboards to IWBs did not change the teachers’ classroom practices in any significant way. 2014), we observed how experienced physics teachers used the IWB in their lessons. The motivation for the study described in this paper came out of the observation of IWB use in authentic physics lessons in a Slovenian high school. 2007 Kennewell 2006 Sweeney 2013 Warwick and Kershner 2008). In fact, many have cautioned that the IWB can even reinforce traditional teaching styles because it is so well suited for whole-class, teacher-led pedagogy (Cutrim Schmid 2011 Higgins et al.
However, ironically, as Gray ( 2010) points out, one of the key reasons for the IWB’s successful and rapid uptake by teachers is that it can be placed in a traditional classroom without significantly disrupting teacher-centered classroom practices. One of the main arguments for the massive uptake of IWBs that we have seen in schools is that they can help improve whole-class teaching by adding to the lessons’ visual impact and interactivity (Hennessy and London 2013). In the last decade, the interactive whiteboard IWB has become a widespread piece of educational technology. Furthermore, we found that the teacher’s confidence in the mastery of the IWB plays a crucial role in the teacher’s willingness to transfer agency within the lesson to the students. We found that an entrenched culture of traditional white/blackboard use in physics instruction interferes with more technologically innovative and more student-centered instructional approaches that leverage the IWB’s unique instructional potential.
To interpret the data, we used the conceptual framework of activity theory. We used an ethnographic approach to account for the teacher’s and involved students’ perspectives throughout the process of teacher preparation, lesson planning, and the implementation of the lesson.
We describe how a high school physics teacher learned to use an IWB in a new way, how she planned and implemented a lesson on the topic of orbital motion of planets, and what tensions arose in the process. This is particularly noticeable in high school physics. However, the unique possibilities of IWBs are rarely leveraged to enhance teaching and learning beyond the primary school level. The IWB is essentially a large touch screen, that enables the user to interact with digital content in ways that are not possible with an ordinary computer-projector-canvas setup. In recent decades, the interactive whiteboard (IWB) has become a relatively common educational tool in Western schools.
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