I attended a Robert Marzano workshop last summer with several colleagues. While there I attended a seminar on clickers (classroom response systems) and got rather energized about using them in my class to help streamline formative assessments. After returning from the conference I started researching clickers and found that several companies that made them also manufactured interactive whiteboards. After finding a company I liked we brought them in to do an initial demo for myself and several other teachers. Nobody seemed too excited so the principal and I decided to schedule a full day of demonstrations to allow more people to see the whiteboards and clickers in a slightly longer presentation.

Needless to say after the presentation I wanted to get a board and set of clickers for my classroom. The principal found some grant money we could use and we purchased an interactive whiteboard with rolling wheels (the best way to get the grant money was to allow other people to use the board)and set of clickers. I thought oh well there goes the board. Have wheels will travel. To my surprise nobody has asked to use it in their room! Our world language teacher has used the clickers several times and has come in to my class to use the interactive whiteboard on two occasions. But that is it. This really surprised me. I figured people would love the whiteboards even if they weren’t interested in clickers.

I think the longer demo certainly had peoples’ attention. Several did not see relevance to either the age group or subject they taught. This is definitely a sales issue. The sales reps who came were not ex-teachers. I think if they had been they could have provided more practical examples how the boards could have benefited these teachers. The impression left from their sales pitch was they were trained in some of the bells and whistles of the board and software, but not how to show a variety of teachers how the boards could make teaching, record keeping and lesson development more streamlined and dynamic.

Boosting teacher confidence with the software would be the greatest challenge. I use a lot of technology in my teaching and I found the software slow to learn, even after taking several online courses. It is not as intuitive or “self-teachable” as say Word or PowerPoint. The best way to build confidence would be to walk teachers through the software biting off little bits at a time. Helping them create several basic flipcharts (similar to a slideshow, but much more dynamic in its abilities) would certainly instill confidence.

Once they have experienced the satisfaction of creating and using a basic flipchart of their own, building their depth of knowledge of the software would be much easier. From there the ARCS model can become a loop feeding back on itself.