Abstract:

In 2009 the Italian Ministry of education has started a three year National Plan for the Deployment of Interactive Whiteboards in schools. During the first year, the Plan provided about 8.000 whiteboards that were placed into classrooms and more than 24.000 teachers were supported in the adoption of this technology through a professional development programme.
The paper presents the results of a text analysis activity within the online community of the teachers involved in the Plan. The aim of the analysis, performed during the early stages of the TPD programme, was to understand which values or ideas teachers were attaching to IWB in the initial stage of the adoption and to describe the most common expectations and preconceptions towards this technology. As a result, it was intended to produce information and case studies for the tutors supporting teachers in the professional development programme.

This paper focuses on the main issues that emerged from this analysis. The work pointed out that, according to the teacher's background with ICT, both expectations and values attached to the IWB can vary significantly. For instance, teachers who rarely use digital technology, both in their professional and personal life, may experience some difficulty in understanding that a IWB is mainly a computer peripheral. These teachers consider the IWB a stand alone technology and tend to identify its functionalities with those of the authoring software released by vendors. In those cases, expectations and pratices seems to be strongly modelled by this misconceptions.
The text analysis also pointed out that many teachers within the community use linguistic sterotypes (expressions as “digital natives”, “new languages”) to express their beliefs in the adoption of IWBs. Many posts in the forums refer to an idea of a necessary and inevitable “change” that will occur placing whiteboards into the classrooms, but a considerable number of them points out that this change is needed mainly to regain students attention during the lesson, not to transform pedagogy or to improve students skills and performance.
In the last part of the paper, we discuss how expectations and preconceptions may affect IWBs' adoption and practices and how professional development can impact positively on the process.

Keywords:

Interactive whiteboard, teachers professional development.