BTW, What is an IWB, anyhow?

Some wore sandals; some wore shorts. Some came straight from Starbucks. About 550 Loudoun County Public School teachers went back to school at Stone Bridge High School on June 22 to bond with the interactive white boards (IWBs) that will be in every classroom in the county, K-12, this fall. 

Promethean (a trade name) white boards are the latest electronic innovation for schools. They combine video, audio, text and real-time computations into a cumbersome piece of hardware that can click Power Point under the bus. 

LCPS wants an IWB in every classroom and is “doing a crunch” to have them installed when school starts in August, said Lynn McNally, LCPS technical resources supervisor. Almost 60 percent of the elementary classrooms and every middle and high school are already equipped with IWBs, McNally said. Of 838 new boards, 481 will be installed in kindergarten, first, second, third, and fourth grade classrooms that don't have them now.

To keep “ActivLoudoun” from feeling like work, attendance was checked at the end of the day, not the start.  Presence at this non-contract day of training was voluntary. Teachers were offered free instruction, free lunch (paid for by Promethean, the manufacturer of the white boards) and a chance to win Kindles, wireless keyboards, and “voice response systems (VRS),” hand-held, interactive modules that allow student responses to be recorded, computed, analyzed, and projected on a white board as a bar graph. There was even a t-shirt toss.

"Welcome, welcome," said Sharon Ackerman, LCPS superintendent for instruction. "This is more than professional training. This is a celebration of student learning … and the courage of the school board,” she said, a reference to vocal political opposition that answered the $4 million purchase price for the last 838 IWBs. “We are finally able to have equity in every classroom," Ackerman said. 

She praised the teachers. “You are professional educators. You are early adapters. You will make the difference in your school,” she said.

Technology teachers rave about IWBs, interchangeably called by their trade name, “Promethean boards,” or the generic term, “white boards.” They are wired to classroom computers and use interactive software. Rather than presenting black type on white paper, these screens integrate video, audio, music, photos, graphics, and typed or touched-in answers from students via their VRS units.

"They've changed teaching completely," said Amy Morrison of Farmwell Station Middle School, one of the presenters. Hardware add-ons like Promethean’s "Active Expression" modules let students sign in, comment individually, and answer teachers' questions. Students are less constrained when not afraid of a wrong answer, said Jeff Frazee, a technology resource teacher at Broad Run High School. "Kids normally would not go out on a limb for fear of being ridiculed.”

Ginno Kelley, a Promethean representative and former teacher, calls visual learning "the primary literacy of the 21st century." Kelley said a teacher who shows a picture in the classroom, then talks about it, actually uses two different mediums. Presented with type alone, students feverishly copy down information, then zone out at the end of the page, he said.

Projecting huge images of different kinds of tigers accompanied by graphic silhouettes to contrast their height with a man six feet tall, Kelley described the tigers' eyes, stripes and habitat. Integrating photos and words make the material easier to learn, he said. He discussed color and type fonts and demonstrated how to use a grid to align dissimilar elements in a digital "flipchart" for classroom use.

The teachers had the rest of the day to choose among classroom sessions taught by Loudoun technology resource teachers, who teach other teachers about software, hardware peripherals, and how to actually use  IWBs.

As students, some of the teachers were disciplined learners. Susie Chapman, a teacher at Sterling Middle School, already uses an IWB but wants to know more techniques. She relies too much on some software tools and wants to use the ones she doesn't know as well, she said:  "I need to learn more." 

Does she like her IWB? "Some days yes, some days no," Chapman said.

One Wednesday session for elementary school was overenrolled with 40 teachers in a classroom for 25.  Many are getting IWBs for the first time. "So if we wanted to build a flip chart, what would we do, first, second and third?" asked a group of four teachers from Tolbert Elementary who stayed after the other 35 departed. "How do we start? What's the process?" 

“‘Interactive’ means getting the kids up and working with the [IWB] board," said Kimberly Rouse, technology resource teacher at Newton-Lee Elementary in Ashburn. “Then use software tools to get their attention,” she told them.  

Video from sources like teacher blogs and "Promethean Planet," an online source fed by the manufacturer, can constantly provide new material and save teachers time on research. Someone asked how to use templates, or grids like the one displayed by Kelley. "I know I've seen grids,” Rouse said. "I just don't ever have the time to mess with them.”

The talk turned to limitations. Projector bulbs that illuminate the white boards are pricey. They are supposed to last 3,000 hours, but at older schools, the power supply can fluctuate, and they burn out sooner.

Teachers sometimes leave the bulbs on because they take time to warm up, said one of the Tolbert teachers. “I have a portable [white board] in my classroom now, and it’s like ‘la, la, la, la,’ while we wait for everything to load and turn on.”

Loudoun teachers have to pace from the front of the classroom where the IWB is installed on the board, to computers in the rear of the classroom, where fiber and power "drops" connect them to the IWBs that are in the front.

Only five teachers signed up for Frazee's IWB demonstration titled "Finding the Truth about Chemicals." He began with a request that one of them "disable the dark-suckers."  No one responded because no one recognized the term "dark-suckers" until Frazee gave a sober-faced explanation that defined them as lights.

A touch of the IWB by the "magic ink" in Frazee’s interactive pen triggered calming Appalachian folk music to play from the white board as he began lecturing about a scary chemical called "di-hydrogen monoxide" that contributes to global warming and sometimes has harmful effects on humans. He cited three sources, including governmental agencies.

He explained that classroom lights work by sucking darkness from the air, and that the IBS light source similarly had sucked darkness from his hand and projected it on the IWB.

Then he asked the teachers a multiple-choice question: was his lecture properly sourced? They answered with Active Expression hand-helds, and a bar graph appeared on the white board.

No, it was not, most of them said. His three sources were really all the same one, and DHMO, the chemical he talked about, is a little-used chemical name for water. And the lecture, jazzed up with Promethean conventions like a “reveal” tool that covered answers until the magic ink pen waved them away, was really a hoax. 

He was not really talking about water, or “dark suckers,” or magic ink. He was showing what happens when there’s no critical thinking and no one challenges sources.

That kind of creativity is what white boards encourage teachers to build into presentations, and that is what they came to ActivLoudoun to learn, many of them said.

Asked about the apparent gap between reality and public perception that contributed to the political reaction to LCPS’s $4 million white board purchase, one teacher explained it this way:

“There’s been a lot of politics going on about IWBs. A lot of that has to do with not understanding how they can be used.”