Interactive screens will be at the heart of 21st-century teaching, writes IAN CAMPBELL

A QUICK glance down the bustling aisles of BETT, the education technology show that took place in London last week, left no doubt that interactive screens would be at the centre of 21st-century teaching.

They were everywhere, not just whiteboards but new LCD and plasma TVs with touch-screen capabilities and classroom-friendly designs.

As well as established whiteboard vendors, new entrants like Samsung have seen an opportunity to bring products honed for television entertainment and digital signage to the lucrative education sector. The Korean company was showcasing the 650TS e-Board, a massive 65-in touchscreen that works with interactive PC software and audiovisual content.

Education specialists like Inclusive Technology, a British firm that develops special-needs solutions, was demonstrating plasma touchscreens that could be tipped and lowered for children in wheelchairs and, combined with learning software, tailored to different cognitive abilities.

In the main exhibition hall were the market leaders, Smart Technologies and Promethean, showing off their latest interactive products and offering a teasing taste of things to come.

Moving on from the basic technology, which lets a projector display computer applications on to an interactive surface, Smart has a dual-touch board enabling two users to write on a board simultaneously.

It also has a prototype “Smart table” where pupils are encouraged to sit around an interactive surface in groups and collaborate.

Promethean launched a self-paced learning application accessed by pupils through learning response systems that let them answer questions posed on the main board, each user able to respond in their own time.

Pupils use hand-held clickers that are becoming increasingly sophisticated – Promethean’s ActivExpression looks like a mobile phone.

Research consistently shows that interactive whiteboards lead to attainment gains in the classroom. In Britain in the late Nineties, the positive data prompted the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency to make money available for every British primary school to buy one.

A backlash followed, however, when it became apparent that many boards had become glorified projectors because no one had taught teachers how to use them properly.

Responding to the criticism, both Smart and Promethean embarked on development programmes and built web portals for teachers to share lessons and whiteboard best practice.

“The professional development around the pedagogy required to use whiteboards has been slower than I would have liked,” says David Martin, executive chairman and co-founder of Smart Technologies. “Whiteboards are no use to our industry if they’re not being used, but there are lots of ways of addressing the problem.”

He believes teacher training colleges have a bigger role to play.

“Making sure teachers are ICT literate is really important and that means getting them interested in computers before they are in schools, not afterwards. Training colleges are not providing as much ICT education as they should.”

Graham Byrne, head of Ireland for Promethean, agrees that professional development is the missing element. “That’s why we use ex-teachers to train teachers all across Europe. We have six in Ireland working directly for us and four more through resellers.”

Smart employs two full-time teachers and uses partner trainers along with additional resources that can be brought in from Britain.

There is another challenge for whiteboard vendors in Ireland.

The Department of Education recently announced a €150 million budget for schools, to be spent on equipping classrooms with a laptop and a projector. There was no mention of whiteboards in a State where penetration is already small – 10-15 per cent of schools is the optimistic estimate.

Jerome Morrissey, director of the National Centre for Technology in Education, the body that oversees the use of technology in Irish schools, has gone on record questioning if interactive whiteboards are the best investment.

Morrissey was also on the committee set up by the national centre and by ICT Ireland, the Ibec group representing Ireland’s high-tech companies, which concluded that money was better spent on a laptop and a projector.

Whiteboards cost between €800 and €5,000, while a projector and laptop combined will come in at about €1,500.

Not surprisingly, Martin does not agree with the Irish strategy.

“Putting projectors in is a baseline but I don’t think that it’s the right way to go about it.

“If I’m standing in front of a class with a whiteboard, I can look at the class and get their attention. I’ve seen the situation where teachers work on their computer and the students start messing around. You just don’t want that.”

Not only is it easier to teach with a whiteboard, according to Martin, students are more engaged. He also argues that teachers could spend less time in preparation because they can reuse lesson materials.

Both whiteboard companies have online portals, Promethean Planet and Smart Exchange, where teachers can share content as well as best practise teaching techniques.

There is also a burgeoning market for other content providers.

Prim-Ed publishing, an Irish company that writes and publishes books for primary schools, is about to launch digital versions of its titles that can be downloaded on the web and taught using whiteboards.

“People are screaming out for whiteboard content,” says marketing manager Jessica Murphy. “They don’t want to spend all their time building their own lesson materials, so we provide tried-and-tested books in an interactive digital format that they can use in front of the class.”

As a distributor of whiteboards and overlays that turn an ordinary flatscreen television into an interactive surface, Prim-Ed is another advocate of the technology.

“A laptop and projector is a great place to start,” says Murphy, “but the next step for most schools will be to buy a whiteboard. We see teachers going to great lengths to use them the best way that they can.”