2011/6/29 Rony Bill gnulinuxist@gmail.com:
installed in some places too. Lives of the teachers cannot be made easy if they are burdened with extra labour of preparing Power Point slide shows every day or for every topic. What is happening is that the hardware is being marketed with big ideas and to make it look useful, the teachers have to make the software.
On the contrary, the teachers I have interacted with have been quite appreciative of these "e-learning" boxes in the classrooms. The interactive whiteboards are not just simply a place to project the computer screen; they are, well, interactive. What you write on the board is stored for later re-use. The marker pen behaves like a mouse pointer on a web page (tap for related information on the board).
Teachers already spend a lot of time preparing for classes (my sister-in-law, who teaches Mathematics for Class XII at NPS Bangalore, spends a good 2-3 hours daily preparing for the next day's class). Powerpoint or any other tool at the basic level only substitutes for notebooks in this task.
I see a whole host of possibilities, really.
Could you expand on this. I would also like to know from the group if any research has been done on electronic teaching aids and how have they actually made a difference. How are things done in other countries? Has anybody had experiences there?
As I said, I did some work for a company in this field a while back. My team visited several schools in the eastern belt (Kolkata and suburbs, Bhubaneshwar, Hyderabad and Chennai); almost every teacher we spoke to had only kind words to say about these products. I personally sat through a class (Class II) in South City School, Kolkata - the kids of the class really enjoyed interacting with the whiteboard.
Imagine a geography class with Google Earth. Or a Chemistry class with a periodic table on the whiteboard that responds to clicks. The possibilities are endless. Some of the schools we visited had eliminated all paper/canvas maps and charts from their libraries.
In summary, school administrators, teachers and students we interacted with were all impressed by these devices - the only thing that inhibits their adoption is that they are quite expensive.
Binand