Earlier this year, I gave a presentation at the Brainstorm 2021 virtual conference titled Life Beyond Interactive Whiteboards that chronicled our transition from interactive whiteboards to teachers using iPads as portable whiteboards they could use to present from anywhere. The conference session is still available on demand for another month if you attended the conference. I encourage you to check it out if that is an option. I will also include the slides at the end of this post.
Our district’s interactive technology story starts in 2009. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but the landscape was very different, especially in regards to interactivity. The iPhone was only two years old. Androids had just been released. Most people still had a flip phone or Blackberry. iPads wouldn’t exist until 2010. Schools were doing their best to prepare students for a future that was technologically advanced beyond what any of them had ever imagined but nobody knew exactly what that looked like.
Enter the “Classroom of the Future” project.
Our district, as part of its Digital Learning Initiative, made the decision to put interactive whiteboards and projectors in each classroom. These were dry-erase boards, but better! Teachers could use the stylus both to write on the board and to manipulate the image projected from the computer. They could “click” with it to close windows and highlight text. It really was magical for the time, to the point where younger students referred to the stylus as a “magic wand” and considered it a special privilege to get to use it.
Eventually, the magic wore off. Teachers broke the styli or lost them. Some forgot that the boards were interactive and only used them as a backdrop to show videos. iPads were released and the novelty of an interactive board wore off when everyone had an interactive device in their hand. Still, the teachers had grown attached and did not want to give up the boards when they inevitably reached end of life and we looked into replacing them.
We evaluated several options. SMART boards were still the standard for interactive whiteboards but now there were also touch panels on the market, interactive projectors, and smart TVs. The more we looked at these, though, we realized that they were all still living in this 2009 mentality of emulating a chalkboard. Every single option required the teacher to be at the front of the board with something in their hand. Surely in 2019, there was a better option.
There was. A little application called Reflector was a game-changer for us. Reflector had been a standard install on teacher computers for years. It seems simple – when Reflector is running, it turns the computer into an AirPlay target so that it can be used to mirror the screen of an iPad. Since the computer is connected to a projector, this means that the whole class can see the iPad that is being mirrored. The teacher is free to move anywhere in the room and use iPad applications to present instead of being stuck up front.
This really is a huge change. Consider these two scenarios:
- Interactive Whiteboard: The teacher is at the front of the class with her back to the students. She is writing out an equation with a stylus on her interactive whiteboard. Despite the word interactive in the title, the process is very similar to the chalkboard and chalk method that teachers have been using for centuries. Several students in the classroom need help. They raise their hands, but the teacher can’t see them. When she eventually turns around and sees the raised hands, she puts down the stylus and walks to a student to see what the problem is. She realizes she didn’t explain something well enough so she walks back to the front of the room and turns her back again to write another equation.
- iPad and Reflector: The teacher stands wherever she wants in the room. She enables screen mirroring on her iPad and writes out an equation. Even though she is walking around, all students can see what she is doing. She glances up and sees students raising their hands. She walks to them (iPad in hand) and sees the issue. She writes another equation on the iPad and looks around to make sure everyone understands, clarifying on the spot any questions that students have.
This is just one example. The iPad offers even more possibilities. Maybe the teacher and students are collaborating in a shared Jamboard document. Maybe the teacher calls on a student to present and he uses screen mirroring with his own iPad. Maybe several iPads are mirrored to the computer screen and the teacher has a race to see who can solve the equation fastest. These are just some of the ways that our teachers have found to use this technology in the classroom.
Of course, there is a catch. Teaching this way requires a mindset shift and it is hard to visualize what this looks like just by reading or explaining. You really have to show it in person to demonstrate the magic of how everything comes together. We did this with multiple training sessions led by the tech department. We set up Reflector on a MacBook connected to a projector and showed how easy it is to turn an iPad into a portable whiteboard. There are multiple apps out there that do this, but Explain Everything and eduCreations are the two that seemed to work the best for our environment. We targeted a lot of our training toward teachers in the K-2 buildings since those students tend to be the most hands-on. It was a little shocking how positive the reception was. Teachers loved having the ability to present while being mobile. They could walk to the back of the room and check work while still demonstrating what to do for the class. It was magical.
We are now almost a full school year into the change and the reception remains positive. Seeing teachers embrace the change really cemented the idea that the real “Classroom of the Future” is not just an updated version of chalk on a chalkboard. It’s a mobile, active place where interactivity is in the hands of everyone.
The slides from my presentation are available here, either as a PowerPoint or PDF. While this blog post is focused on the abstract ideas behind making this change, the slides go into more depth on technical details, why we didn’t choose to go with interactive panels or projectors, and how me managed the transition. The PowerPoint also includes a demo of how it works from the teacher’s point of view: