The power of interactive whiteboards

It's been two years since we adopted IWB's (fondly referred to as e-boards) in all our classrooms at Cultura Inglesa. In 2008 I participated in a Promethean-led panel presentation at IATEFL where I presented our teaher training project during the first year we introduced the IWBs. The feeling then was that IWBs were a mystery and somewhat of a challenge to some and for those who had implemented them, a great discovery. The room was devided between those who believed in it's potential and those who were very sceptical. Indeed, one of the things that stood out was that language schools which had simply stuck to using the materials produced by international publishers inevitably ran into the possiblity of creating a very teacher-centred lesson and, not to put it too bluntly, perhaps a boring lesson. The materials in most cases were complete copies of coursebooks. And I really think that that is the issue we understood quite early on when we did our research and decided to adopt the IWB. We needed to take the activities we produced as a publisher a step further and nedded to encourage teachers to do tha same when they produced their own material.

The IWB does indeed allow for interactivity provided teachers and learners accept a new challenge in terms of teaching/learning roles and provided we begin thinking of the course syllabus in a slightly more open manner, acknowledging that there is indeed room for extemporisation in the language class and goin beyond whta is trditionally done in an EFL classroom. The role of the teacher as educator rather than just as an EFL teacher is something that emerges from this new cenario.

So, what was my great surprise to see that at this year`s IATEFL the tide had sort of turned and an attack of sorts was aunched against IWB's by prominent EFL/ESL experts. See what they had to say in the IATEFL discussion forum: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/forum/iwbs-are-useless-discuss

So this set me thinking. As we are about a group of 700 teachers using IWBs on a daily basis I thought we could begin thinking about the following question: How interactive is the IWB?

Please feel free to post comments in this blog and perhaps provide links to your own blogs in which you show some examples of interactivity. Perhaps some of you have you tubes showing your work? Post the links pelase. Alternatively join my Twitter:http://twitter.com/vbenevolofranca where I asked the same question. But I'm also interested in examples in which you think the IWB actually reduced interactivity. Let`s share these issues and see where we get.
Check Graham Stanley`s Twitter to see some ideas of interactivity he found: http://twitter.com/grahamstanley