So what does it really say? Unsurprisingly, it does not say that iwbs are a waste of money:

Overall, the statistical analysis failed to find evidence of any impact of the increase in IWB acquisition in London schools on attainment in the three core subjects in the academic year 2004/5. However, given the variation in use documented in the case studies, this is in line with what we would predict at this stage in the policy cycle.

The study is worth reading in its entirety, but if you want my spin on it, I picked up on a couple of key points:

A theme running through the report is that this technology itself will not change what happens in classrooms.

….the introduction of an IWB does not in and of itself transform existing pedagogies. The capacity of IWBs to support, extend or transform existing pedagogies depends upon the teacher’s intent and the ways in which they exploit the resources they have access to.

Positive change in classrooms will occur only if teachers consciously seek change. This seems pretty obvious really. It echoes the discrediting of the “spray and pray” approach to investing in IT in education. The unfortunate conclusion drawn by many from this obvious fact is that whiteboards are useless. Of course that’s nonsense. If you stuck a bunch of teenagers behind the wheels of cars and found that they didn’t instantly become safe drivers would it be reasonable to conclude that cars are useless?

An interesting question then arises – how should an authority make the most of this technology? In other words, how can we encourage teachers to seek to change what happens in their classrooms? The report has this to say:

Given the diversity of classroom use for the technology and the difficulties of foreseeing its full potential at this stage (see section 5), our own research raises questions about the aptness of predicating formal training on a dissemination model where the pedagogic possibilities of the technology are presumed to be both well defined and finite.
We would advocate more emphasis on the role of jointly facilitating mutual exploration of what the technology can do in context, with the aim of building teachers’ understanding of when and how IWBs can be most appropriately exploited for a specific pedagogical aim. We would envisage that such an exploration would be less tied to the dissemination of a specific set of IWB techniques such as drag and drop, but more open to exploring teachers’ own pedagogical purposes, and the role the IWB might play in achieving them. We see individual teacher’s commitment to exploring the potential of the technology as an important resource for colleagues that could act as a catalyst for change if it were well supported.

And so we come back to the same old stuff! Using an interactive whiteboard effectively requires the same kind of effort, exploration and reflection that teaching effectively does. And your colleague in the next room who’s found something that works may be more useful to you than all the in-service under the sun.

Over this year I have sought to act as the enthusiastic colleague next door rather than the deliverer of in-service. I hope that my colleagues have benefited from my enthusiasm, but would not presume to speak on their behalf.

I’ll return to this study in future posts no doubt – 161 pages take a while to digest!

Labelling the devices

Your voting pads will have numbers 1 to 32 on them somewhere. Take the time to write these numbers on the top with indelible marker pen. Trust me, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.

Setting up a flipchart for voting with a class

• Open your flipchart
• Go to ACTIVote/session
• Click on “Named Mode”
• If the pupils in the list don’t match your class, click on “Users…” then select your class from the dialogue that appears

Classroom routines

Pupils will need to know which device is attached to their name. I would start by having the user database screen showing on the first lesson with ACTIVote. Ask pupils to take the device with the number beside their name, then to make a note of that number in their jotter/planner. In subsequent lessons, establish the routine that if the box is open at the front of the room, they take their device on the way in. This saves a bit of time.

At the end of the lesson, take the time to develop the good routine that the devices go back into the box in the right order, ready for the next class. If I can manage this level of organisation, anyone can!

Running ad-hoc votes the terror-free way

So, we’re finally ready to vote! Electronic voting systems allow every pupil to communicate directly with the teacher simultaneously and confidentially. That’s amazingly powerful, so we need to be careful not to mess it up!

• DON’T EVER DISPLAY RESULTS WITH PUPIL NAMES ON THE WHITEBOARD

If you need convincing of this, read my cautionary tale here.

When it comes to it, the process of running a vote is very simple:

• Take a fresh flipchart page (votes are stored on a one-per-page basis)
• Write up a question on the board
• Ask the class to work out the answer and write it down ( I find this works better than just giving them the choices from the start)
• Once they have answers, write up or reveal your multiple choices and click on the voting pad icon in your toolbar

You’ll now see a banner across the top of the screen with each pupil’s name on it. As the pupils vote, their names turn yellow.

Once everyone has voted, click again on the voting pad icon. If everyone has voted, you’ll be shown the summary screen. If not, you’ll be asked whether or not you want to give the slow turtles a chance to vote.

The summary screen is pretty self explanatory:

Option B is highlighted as correct here because I clicked on it – the system is not that clever! This screen and the right/wrong summary are the only screens you should show your class. Clicking on who answered what brings up the full vote results (different vote – no names here because I’m writing this at home on a machine that does not have my user database on it):

This “who answered what” screen is very useful – view it once you have frozen or switched the board to “no show”!

The picture above shows an example of a couple of pupils voting for F, when options A to D were only given. This will almost certainly happen in every class, but once they realise that you know who voted what, and that you will not allow them to take part in voting unless they take it seriously, they will soon stop.

Pre-prepared votes

Promethean have this excellent pair of flash animations showing how to use question master:

• Question Master Part 1
• Question Master Part 2

Formative Assessment with ACTIVote

This is the most important bit, so I’ll put it into a separate post…..

So…. to provide a bit of backup, here’s a step by step guide to using Activote with your class.

The following assumes that the voting pads have been registered with your PC. If not, chase up IT!

Setting up the User Database

You’ll want your pupil names to be stored in the system, so that their names appear at the top of the screen when you run a vote. Here’s how….

In East Lothian, we have a problem – we don’t have write-access to the place on the C drive where the user database is stored! To get around this, we need to copy the default user database to somewhere that is writeable, then tell ACTIVStudio that we’ve done so:

• In ACTIVStudio, go to ACTIVote/user database. You should see this (click image to enlarge):

• Go to File/Save as and save the user database into subjects/maths/staff
• Go to Activote/Settings, and change the ACTIVote User Database to the file you just copied

Importing Pupils into the User Database

Before you can import pupils into your user database, you need to export them from whatever electronic record you currently use. This is relatively easy from either Excel or Filemaker:

• export the following columns to a “CSV” file: first name, surname, register class
• In ACTIVStudio, go back into ACTIVote/user database.
• Go to File/import and choose the CVS file that you just made. This dialogue will appear:

• By clicking on the red headings, you can tell ACTIVote which fields are which, then import

The newly imported pupils appear at the bottom of the left hand side scrolling window.

• Double click on folder to change them to teacher names
• Double click on sub folders to change them to class names
• Drag over the pupils and click on the arrow to move them into the classes

You now have a user database that all staff in the department can access.  Just make sure that everyone changes their ACTIVote settings to point to the new user database.

The importing section of what we just did is covered excellently here at PrometheanPlanet.

Coming in Part Two…..

• Setting up a flipchart to vote with a particular class
• Classroom routines
• Running adhoc votes (my favourite!) the terror-free way
• Creating pre-prepared votes
• Using ACTIVote for formative assessment (the whole point of the exercise!)

The first session I attended was run by an enthusiastic chap (whose name I’ve failed to record). He spoke to us about the way that his department is using interactive whiteboards to support formative assessment developments: waiting times, questioning techniques, self/peer assessment, group/pair work etc. It was a fascinating session – these points stood out for me:

• Sharing learning objectives on first slide – flip back at end of lesson
• Pair work – one minute silent, then one minute discussing with partner using clock
• Pupils making up question – make up a trinomial that factorises!
• A thick white pen over text can be rubbed out to expose the text

What really shone through the session was the extent to which the presenter’s thinking was grounded in the reality of the pupils in his school. In Port Glasgow, in appears that pupils are by-and-large quite happy to traffic light and admit to weaknesses in front of their classmates. This is so different from the culture at North Berwick, where most pupils are uncomfortable about admitting to needing support.

During the coffee break, John Connelly from Musselburgh Grammar shared the following technical tip with me: a button exists in the toolstore that disables the right-click on the pen. Very handy – thanks John!

After the break, I went to a session run by John and [will insert name here once I find it] from Promethean. They showed us some technical tips – I learned about the action icons that are already in the library, and about work with layers.

On the way out, and on the journey home, I think I heard both Tim Schmitz and Paul Goodall saying that they were planning to start blogging about their use of the interactive whiteboards (amongst other things). This is great news – go for it guys!