I have just read Tristan’s blog “A study into interactive whiteboards” and I agree with what he said to some degree. I agree that they are interactive and engage students and help them understand and develop skills in literacy. However, I have seen interactive whiteboards or smart boards being used in classrooms, and yes sometimes they have technological troubles, but they brought understanding to the children they would not have gotten from the teacher using just the whiteboard.

For example, in a year two music lesson a teacher used a website using the smart board that could organise sounds into orders and patterns and replay them back to you. It demonstrated the way students should organise sound and how to demonstrate what you mean when writing it out, in a way that you could not do if you were just using a white board, even if you had musical instruments. It gave the students instant feedback about the way their sound compilations sounded, and whether it made sense to organise the sound in the way they did.