But I wasn’t there to reminisce, or to revisit my childhood (brrrrrr), or even to prey on small children. I was there to take a look at their interactive whiteboards (IWB), and to see how they are used in lessons.

For those of you who haven’t come across these things, they’re great big boards that are hooked up to a computer. At their most basic they are simply screens onto which you can project software or a page from the internet, but, as their name suggests, they are generally used in much more ‘interactive’ ways than that. The screen is touch sensitive, so students can drag elements of it around with their finger, or write text directly onto the screen with a special pen.

In the short class I saw, the students did four exercises, including one on symmetry using a projected grid. The teacher created a shape out of differently coloured squares in one quadrant of the grid, and the students took turns to come up to the board and tap different squares to create a symmetrical shape in the other three quadrants and make it different colours. In the end, 17 of them had worked together to create a perfectly symmetrical shape, and had learnt the words ‘horizontally’ and ‘vertically’. Much more engaging and memorable than colouring in squares by yourself in a jotter (though of course they still do that sort of exercise as reinforcement).

The next exercise was to do with money. The teacher called up a screen with a picture of an empty wallet, and some images of various British notes and coins. She then gave individual students a target amount, and they had to come up to the board and ‘drag’ the notes and coins into the purse to get the exact amount. While they took turns to do this, the rest of the class watched intently, clearly doing the arithmetic in their heads. Something about the performative element of the activity held their interest and ignited their competitiveness much more than if the teacher had simply been writing the task on the board and calling on individuals to answer it.

Next they did a geography task, where they had to drag the names of countries and cities to the correct location on a map of the UK. Like true Scots, their English geography was totally crap. Good to see patriotism is still very much part of the national curriculum of Scotland. Oddly, this was the one activity they didn’t seem to enjoy particularly, whereas my inner nerd was screaming: ‘Aberdeen is three inches south, you stupid dolts!’

The final task was arithmetic. The teacher called up a program that had all the students’ names pre-programmed, and the computer picked names at random. (‘It always picks me last!’ sulked an enthusiastic boy called Colin.) Whomever was picked got to choose either an addition, subtraction, multiplication or division question and a level of difficulty ranging from easy to medium to difficult to EXTREME. The harder the question, the more points for a correct answer. I was surprised to see most students picking difficult or extreme multiplication and division questions. I was horrified to discover that I couldn’t answer most of these (I think I was off for the whole of mental arithmetic, or maybe I was too busy thinking about the grid references of British cities). Most of the students got the answers wrong though, so I guess their ambitions slightly outweigh their abilities in this department (probably a good attitude to have when approaching maths).

I came away with a lot of ideas to apply to my English language lessons. I can see things like interactive matching activities, gap fills, text highlighting, timer clocks and the ability to write directly onto the screen being extremely useful. Perhaps the best thing about IWBs, though, is the way they really focus the attention of the entire class, encouraging them to both work together and think through solutions individually. Regular board work (e.g. teacher writing a sentence with a missing word on the whiteboard) does this to an extent, but something about the IWB galvanises students much more. I think it’s possibly because blackboards and whiteboards tend to ‘belong’ to the teacher, whereas IWBs belong to the students. It is the students who spend most of the time interacting with them, while the teacher simply observes and comments, stepping in to help only occasionally. Students are constantly ready and waiting to take their turn with the IWB, whereas they are seldom invited up to write on the blackboard or whiteboard – these things are pretty much out of bounds, most of the time.

Yet another great thing about IWBs is the way they bring together different learning styles. I’m thinking here about Gardner’s oft-misunderstood Multiple Intelligences model, that defines different styles such as visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic and verbal/linguistic, to name but three. I’ve never really bought the idea that students tend to fall broadly into one or two styles of learning (and according to Gardner, that was never what he meant). Instead I think that most learners need to employ pretty much all of the learning styles at some point during a lesson. This keeps their interest and energy levels high, and reinforces the learning, usually by having the material presented in a variety of different ways. So for example, during the maths quiz, students were looking at a visual representation of the coins and notes, carrying out intrapersonal reflection and logical analysis, while listening to feedback from the teacher and responding when called. Simultaneously they were ready to get up and move to the board in sequence. While at the board they were making spatial decisions about how to move the coins and notes and how to coordinate their own movements to do this as smoothly as possible. No wonder a group of restless 10-year-olds was gripped, attentive and responsive throughout the entire lesson. I’ve taught this age group before and never seen such focus.

Time for some real work now, unfortunately.