Wednesday, September 12, 2012

IWB -v- Apple TV - which is best for 21st century learners?

This afternoon I was in a Kindergarten class and was talking to the teacher there about how she is using  her Apple TV.   We don't have IWBs here, and Tiffany herself told me that she'd never used one so it was hard for her to compare the two, but she gave me lots of ideas for how she is using the Apple TV with her students.  Her Apple TV is connected to a TV that can be moved around in her learning space.  She has a lot of windows in this space and no walls at all so an IWB would not be practical.  She talked about different posters that she has created on her computer that she can pull up for the students to refer to and said she finds this better than a visualizer as she can work with Word documents on her computer that the students can all see.  She also uses it with YouTube and other videos and this morning was using it to connect to the Illuminations website to demonstrate a maths concept.

Tiffany chose to have a MacBook as her BYOD.  She also has an iPad and iPhone that she uses in class.  She was explaining to me that today they had a visitor to the classroom (a dog) and that she was able to connect the iPhone and iPad so that she could take photos and turn them into a slideshow that the students could immediately watch and interact with.  She talked to me about how engaged and excited her students were about this learning.

A couple of years ago at my old school I recommended using Apple TVs with iPads as a better solution than installing SMARTboards in all of our primary classrooms.  Of course this suggestion ran into problems with the one-size-fits-all policy there whereby all classrooms were being outfitted with the same IWBs, and I remember feeling extremely disappointed by the decision to purchase yet another teaching tool instead of spending the money on a set of iPads and putting the technology into the hands of the students.  I've used a SMARTboard since 2000 - when I worked at the International School of Amsterdam we were one of the first schools in the Netherlands to buy them, and I have to say as a teaching tool they were great.  As a learning tool for students though, not so.  Over the years I've dropped into literally hundreds of classrooms where they were not being used optimally, and where they simply reinforced the "sage on the stage" style of teaching.

Over the past couple of years or so I've also seen a different way of doing things, using Airplay, and iPads and an Apple TV.  Last year at ASB Unplugged I saw the participants at one of the presentations interacting with and sharing what they were doing on their iPads with the entire audience.  Anyone could wirelessly project to the entire room from anywhere.

Today I came across the Tech Savvy Teachers blog where the Apple TV-iPad combination was suggested as a better interactive whiteboard.   The post includes the following chart comparing IWBs with Apple TVs +iPads:


I think that one of the comments following this post really sums up the difference:

The nature of the iPad encourages the type of teaching most experts have agreed better meets the needs of 21st Century students.  Does a tool change teaching? Absolutely not, teachers do. But which tool will better facilitate learning? That’s the question we should be asking and the comparison between these two tools is obvious.

7 comments:

  1. Very much enjoying apple TV which is a new addition this year. I also use splashtop http://www.splashtop.com/home to remotely control my PC which allows me to pass out my ipad to a child so he/she can demonstrate, share ideas as you would at an IWB. The added beauty of this is that you can use the PC based software as well as the multitude of flash based websites which are unavailable on the ipad.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your comments David. I'm curious to find out more about how you have been using the combination of Splashtop, your PC and an iPad with your students.

      Delete
  2. Hi Maggie - we've been having exactly the same conversation in our school. Teachers weren't consulted when IWBs were installed (at great expense) a couple of years ago. We've also found they really focus attention at the 'front' of the room. Now we are increasing the numbers of iPads for student learning, we will slowly make the change to large screens + Apple TV.

    You may be interested in this post by @richielambert on the same topic:
    http://richlambert.edublogs.org/2011/11/11/the-day-i-removed-an-interactive-whiteboard-for-the-first-time/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your link to the post Linda. The most crucial paragraph for me was this:
      With iPads in the student’s hands and an Apple TV to mirror them live onto the LCD screen, why on earth would you want a child to come up and actually have to touch the screen at the front of the room to move things around on it!?

      I started asking myself did this new way of working from anywhere in the classroom first need students to have a 1:1 or BYOD. My old school wasn't at all interested in investigating the benefits of those initiatives either.

      Delete
  3. Interesting point. We currently have a class set of iPads, but finding great difficulty sharing them (especially at upper primary) as they are designed as individual devices. We are hoping to go 1:1, at least in Year 6, within a year or two. Our school is also investigating BYOD.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Came across this chart and I disagree with the some of the information. With an interactive whiteboard the primary user is supposed to be the student, not the teacher. A common misconception.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dinah, it may work differently if the primary user is the student - though I haven't often seen classes where this is so (and I have been in hundreds of classrooms with IWBs since 2000). However with KG students and younger, I have found it doesn't work well as I've seen students having to climb on chairs to reach the menu bar or other items at the top of the screen for example. Children also have to keep their fingers on the board while moving things around - again hard for little ones to do when the board is so large. We are now using the Reflector app to mirror the iPads and it is working fine - just saw students using it yesterday in a music class to compose music and it was very easy to use.

      Delete