IWBs in Turkey

As teachers it is often too easy to blame students, they don’t study hard enough, aren’t engaged, don’t care about the subject matter, are too interested in boys, girls, partying, etc. But, what happens when we treat students as consumers?  Süleyman Nihat S¸ Ugur Özhan in their article Honeymoon with IWBs: A qualitative insight in primary students’ views on instruction with interactive whiteboard present results of a phenomenological study of student experiences with classroom instruction utilizing interactive whiteboard technology, and the results are pretty interesting.

First some context, Turkey has been involved for about the past five years in a massive initiative named FATIH, to modernize school classrooms; this effort has brought and will continue to bring millions of pieces of technology to schools, including tablet computers and IWB’s. While this mirrors technological initiatives that are occurring worldwide across countries, regions, districts and schools, the scale of Turkey’s program impresses. However, what effect has this influx of technology had? How is it being used? To explore this the authors took an interesting approach, rather than utilizing a big sample size and authoring a questionnaire, they instead selected a representative school in which IWB had been in place for two years and created focus groups of students, who were enrolled in grades four through eight, 10 students per group. 

The researchers met with each group and facilitated discussions based on three broad questions: What do you like the most about having IWBs in your classes?, What do you like the least about having IWBs in your classes?, and (How) does instruction with an IWB enhance your learning? If you have read other research on IWBs you will not be surprised with the findings of this study. But that does not make them less interesting, if anything the student responses are very insightful.

The researchers utilized both inductive and deductive methods to analyze/sort student responses. Students felt that the boards made their teacher's' instruction more effective. Less time was spent writing or drawing on the board, use of the boards also meant that teacher used more video and web based examples, and students reported that this aided their learning, and they noted that when teachers gave tests on the boards that they could see more questions and work more quickly. The overwhelming response to what they disliked about the boards was related to technical problems. This is not very surprising, with any new technology there are going to be glitches; if students like instruction on IWB it is intuitive that when the boards don’t work that they are likely to feel disappointment or frustration. This result does raise questions about how much technical support has been built into Turkey’s ambitious plan to modernize its schools. Finally, the researchers identified one other response cluster, how does use of IWB enhance learning. Student responses indicated that they felt that IWB instruction helped them visualize and contextualize content and that the teachers were overall more effective when using IWBs.

IWB use in Turkey is still fairly new and it is not surprising that many of the instructional techniques that teachers showed a low level of use and integration. The researchers noted that much of what the students liked about the IWBs as an instructional tool could actually be implemented with a laptop and a projector and did not require IWB technology. This is a common problem noted in many research studies across grade levels, regions, etc., and additional teacher training is often seen as a remedy. Whether Turkey addresses this as part of its technology roll-out, which like any large scale project is likely to have hurdles, remains to be seen.