Things to ponder before switching to IWBs

A colleague asked for advice on some things to consider before switching over from low-tec to hi-tec classrooms with IWBs. I thought others may be interested too, as most of them are general. One or two are British Council specific; ignore those.

• The term before you switch over to IWBs, make it compulsory that teachers do the free online Promethean Activstudio foundation course (they have to register at www.prometheanlearning.com )

• Have a small back-up whiteboard (normal non-tech) in the classroom because things will go wrong, but a large whiteboard just encourages teachers who are ‘reluctant to adapt’ to carry on as usual.

• If you only have a 40Gb T: drive(shared resource drive), upgrade if at all possible, to something larger, once you start building up a bank of materials and digitised audio, it’ll fill up quickly.

• If you use Cutting Edge at all, get the digital coursebooks for the IWB, they are brilliant. The other digital books or digital add-ons are not that great, though definitely more professional looking than a badly scanned worksheet (Face 2 face & the English File iPack are not exactly user friendly or comprehensive)

• Get together with teachers and decide what file structure you will use on the T: drive for shared resources (labelled by book, labelled by level, topic etc, find the system that’ll work best for you. Decide now, not when materials have started to build up in a random fashion.

• Instil best practice from the beginning; there is a document (I’ll try to find it and attach) which outlines appropriate styles, colours, fonts etc for flipchart creation. The guidelines are good and not just there for bureaucratic BC reasons, font size and colour are important. Teachers tend to go a bit crazy with colour at first, this, in general, is not good. Use branded templates right from the start, then teachers don’t get into bad or lazy habits.

• If you have people there with IWB experience, consider putting them on the Promethean level 2 course, which focuses on pedagogically sound IWB materials creation, these people can then help, assist, train and run insetts.

• Talk to your IT guys, how old is the BO/FO bridge? (usually this is also the internet entry point too), if it’s old or you often lose the internet, think about getting it replaced. This can be a nightmare, if the link between the Back Office (where teachers are preparing material) and the Front Office goes down, they have no way of getting their material into a classroom. The USB device restrictions will soon come in to force and they won’t be able to write to non-encrypted USB keys, so you either have to have lots of encrypted USB pen drives as back-up or ensure that the tech that’s in place will work once its throughput is increased.

• If you have lots of YL classes and your classrooms are used for Adult / YL, then spend the extra money on the newer boards with the projector attached, these can slide up and down the wall allowing access to little ones and big ones alike. But you have to have proper walls for these to be installed; thin partition walls can’t take the weight.

• Decide whether each teacher will get there own IWB pen or whether they’ll be one pen per classroom. We use the latter, but they go missing all the time. Have lots of spare pens!

• What will your security policy be? will the doors be locked to the classrooms? Where will remote controls and IWB pens be kept? Will students have to leave the room at break? Can you trust your learners in a classroom full of tech?

• If you can get someone with experience to draw up a simple trouble-shooting doc of the most common problems, and then deliver training to the teachers & management team, you’ll save yourself a lot of griping and hassle.

• If you don’t have someone with the above skill set, pay for me to come to your centre and I’ll do it!