The Fly Swatter Litmus Test

I was reading an article in Education Weekly today entitled “The Interactive Whiteboard Readiness Assessment” by Patrick Ledesma (October 18, 2010).  The article asserted that if you want to see if you would truly benefit from having an interactive whiteboard in your classroom, you should first purchase a run-of-the-mill fly swatter.  That’s right, a fly swatter.  His contention is that many folks do not use technology they way they should and essentially see things like Smartboards as a way to do exactly what they are doing now, but with a little more glitz and glamour.

Ledesma related that years ago, as a special education teacher, he was faced with the challenge of getting his kids to focus when they no longer wanted to focus.  Maybe it had been a long day, maybe it was too hot or too cold in the room, but for whatever reason, the kids could not stay on task.  His solution: a fly swatter.  He bought a plastic fly swatter and then challenged himself to think of games that were interactive that the kids could engage in via the fly swatter (this was the pre-Smartboard era).  He made vocabulary posters and hung them around the room and then had kids run and find the right answer and swat it with the swatter.  And he developed a myriad of other games.  Years later when he received the first Smartboard in his school he tells us, “Making the transition was effortless because I already knew how to design and manage an interactive classroom where students were moving around out of the desks.  I didn’t need technology to make that happen.”

Hmm…he raises a very valid point.  Is the technology we have in our classroom used in a way that truly makes it interactive?  I have been in numerous classrooms where the teacher was blessed to have a Smartboard, but she still spent all of her time lecturing.  The only difference is now she had colored slides to accompany the information she was sharing with her students.  No student ever got out of their seat, no images of any kind were used, no games were played; she simply had some really pretty notes to show the kids.

It is imperative that we remind ourselves that as educators our job is not to just create a pretty version of what we already do when we are lucky enough to get new technology in our room.  The challenge is to courageously ask ourselves: what can I do to truly improve the quality of my teaching and the quality of student learning by utilizing this new technology?  It is not enough to simply move from giving our lectures from our notes to showing kids our notes via the Smartboard.  We must create a new learning experience.

This, of course, can be done in a plethora of ways.  Images are so powerful and there are many that directly relate to what we are teaching.  If I teach a book about the Civil Rights movement, my Smartboard can allow me to show images of Martin Luther King, Jr., the sit ins, Rosa Park, and the integration of public schools.  I can show my kids videos and have them interact with games and challenging puzzles.  I can download movie clips from youtube and have them group brainstorm while organizing their ideas on the Smartboard.  I can give class quizzes and think of interesting ways to create other assessments.  In short, the possibilities are endless.

I used to work with a teacher who had file cabinets filled with mimeographed handouts.  He would open a file draw, pull out a quiz written thirty years ago and hand them out to his students. Oh, and he also had a Smartboard on the wall in the front of his room.  Utilizing the Smartboard would not have necessarily made him a better teacher, but it would have challenged him to finally let go of the mimeographed papers and think about how to reach his students by using technology that they were familiar with and that literally offered him the world.  It would have made his teaching more interesting to him, and I would assert, his students as well.

Technology doesn’t make a poor teacher a good one.  However, it does offer us a new tool, that if used effectively, can make our students better learners.