starting out on the whiteboard journey

We decided to move to interactive whiteboards in all our classrooms this year. That makes it sound very clear and simple, but in fact the decision came about piece by piece.

The first piece in the jigsaw was putting one whiteboard in a classroom/self access room a couple of years ago. People tried it, liked it but didn't feel we had to use it all the time. It was useful for training, for showing film of presentations and for demonstrating programs and stuff on the web, but it was never fully used as a whiteboard, let alone an interactive one. We didn't have time to develop skills as we could only book it once or twice a week. The rest of the week we were back in the classrooms with boards and marker pens, tape players, CD players, flipcharts, printouts.

The next piece was hearing of another language school which had cleared out all the old whiteboards and changed over to electronic boards in all classrooms. Sounded very positive, very brave and very exciting - glad it was someone else doing it and not us! We talked about it, put all the plans and costings into longer term budgets and wondered if it would ever happen.

Suddenly, earlier this year, it was time to find out what the impact would be. The funding suddenly became available, and we had to do all the work on specifications, quotes, ordering and getting everything delivered before the end of July.

Then we had to find the right time to do the installation - difficult if you have summer schools and other courses going on throughout the vacation. Managed that in the second week in September.
Some problems with equipment not working - one whiteboard had to be replaced- and the usual teething problems with any new equipment. Some brave teachers volunteered to start using the whiteboards straight away before we started the training. Thanks to them for doing that.

Two days of staff training last week went well - very busy, very enthusiastic and mostly positive. It was good to see people getting stuck in, trying things out, asking questions, imagining how it would work with our students, our materials.

Some people are still asking what we do if it doesn't work, but I guess that's not surprising - it's a big change, learning new skills, trusting in technology and doing it while trying to look cool, calm and confident in front of a new class.

I'm hoping this blog will give us chance to record how things go, say how we feel about the changes and pass on any tips to each other.