Interactive Whiteboards and the Promise of Ed Tech

Memories of an industry and why tech won't save education

In a past life, I trained teachers how to incorporate technology into their teaching practice. Today I avoid it almost entirely. How did I get here?

The year is 2010 and technology is the buzz word of the education sector. Everyone is attempting to usher in the new Digital Era through the purchase of the next best thing in “Ed. Tech.” It’s the Wild West, and the paydirt for Technology companies is securing School Board contracts to outfit their entire school system with their products. These contracts were worth millions.

One such company was SMART Tech. From their own annual report in 2011, they had shipped more than 2-million interactive whiteboards, which sold for upwards of $1500. Their research indicated that over 30% of schools in America were working towards “100% adoption of interactive whiteboards in their classrooms in the next 3-5 years.” Their direct competitor was Prometheus, which was big in the UK, and sold essentially the same product. EPSON sold interactive projectors - a short throw projector that was packaged with a pen and some very basic software that allowed for on-screen annotations for what almost certainly represented a huge markup over the purchase of the projector alone. The company I worked for, eInstruction, was pushing Clickers - radio-frequency response pads that allowed students to answer short- and multiple-choice questions - and eventually a kind of handheld interactive whiteboard called the MOBI, which was basically a wireless drawing tablet with some drawing software. How many millions did global education systems spend on this technology? And where is that technology today? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but they burn in my mind (and I’m sure the data is available, though perhaps not readily, for any journalist with a similar curiosity) and I have a suspicion that many of them met their end in a recycling depot.

The evidence I do have is anecdotal. In my job today, as a secondary school teacher in the public system, I can count on one hand the number of teachers who use an interactive whiteboard of the variety that was so popular in the 2010s. In fact, I count myself among many teachers who try to avoid tech except for some basic tools. This is not - in my case at least - for a lack of knowledge. I consider myself an advanced user of computers. I can connect In’s and Out’s better than most and have that essential trait, which is not really skill, just stubbornness, that often makes someone the “tech guy” at a meeting. In fact, I think it’s this “ability” with computers that makes me appreciate just how challenging it can be to successfully incorporate technology into any environment. As anyone who has worked in technology knows, the more tech that’s involved, the more time you should expect to spend troubleshooting, which means that, in my experience, it’s easier to stick with analog methods than to build in the time it takes to properly troubleshoot up to 30 different devices and issues with those devices. Not only that, but it’s actually a matter of equity - the 10 students who will have the most trouble with devices are generally the ones who need the most help learning. The students that use an assistive device (those with an IEP) have access and are motivated to figure it out, but for many students, using a device creates a barrier to access learning instead of eliminating them. Spending time getting them hooked up and through the many layers of protection that schools put in place to protect student information (like logging in up to 5 times on some devices for some apps) is often not worth the effort when I can put an analog whiteboard in front of a student and tell them to write a response in under 5 seconds.

These are the same complaints about integrating technology that teachers I spoke with in 2010 made. And yet, there was this incredible push to invest in education technology and IT Departments were tasked with spending the money. As I mentioned, back in 2010, the company I worked for was really pushing response pads or “clickers” which, even now, I think actually produced interesting results. By building multiple choice questions into their instruction, advanced users could pinpoint where in their lesson they really resolved a misconception, or which strategies were being used most frequently to arrive at the solution.

But it was not clickers that really took off, at least in public elementary and secondary schools. It seemed that every Board IT Department was engaged in a race with one another to see who could equip their school with Interactive Whiteboards the fastest. As someone who worked for a company that sold a similarly expensive product that was, to me (a recent graduate of an education program), a much more interesting and useful tool, it was infuriating that Boards were spending so much money on devices that were effectively glorified computer mice. They did nothing that a computer didn’t already do. These massive touch-sensitive screens (which were not touch screens as we know them now, which had yet to make it to market in a real way) required frequent calibration and were prone to bugs and dead spots, and for the hassle and cost, your reward was the ability to create complex slideshows that students could “interact” with through digital annotation - that is, if kids figured out how to hold the pen properly and press the right buttons. The cynical interpretation of this is that it was popular because it allowed some teachers to keep pantomiming teaching in the way that they had always done, in the spirit of the much maligned “chalk and talk” method that has become the poster child of bad pedagogy. But perhaps it was just IT Departments, who are largely comprised of non-educators, trying to make the best decisions possible in a short amount of time, given a small amount of information. It’s impossible to measure, especially now, but I would hazard a guess that the “student engagement” benefits that these companies preached never materialized, the pedagogical advantages that were promised never came through, or at least certainly did not persist.

And so here we are today. We came through a global pandemic, which finally put the nail in the coffin of overhead projectors (which I’m convinced were still being used in some classes prior to), but we are not in a good technology situation. I, and many of my colleagues, still rely on paper for the simple reason that it’s reliable - students can see the work they need to do clearly, they can produce work quickly, and there’s never an issue of access.

Not only that, but in the absence of a computer, you can see a student actually produce the work. More on that and how AI has broken education - but maybe not in a bad way - in a future post.