Students’ use of the interactive whiteboard during physics group work

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) may facilitate collective meaning-making processes in group work in engineering education. In the case, first-year students attended group-work sessions as an organised part of a basic physics course at a Norwegian university college. Each student group was equipped with an IWB, which the groups used to write down and hand in their solutions to the physics problems. Based on a Vygotskian, dialectical stance, this study investigates how the students used the IWB in the group-work situation. From qualitative analysis of video data, we identified four group-work processes where the IWB played a key role: exploratory, explanatory, clarifying and insertion. The results show that the IWB may facilitate a ‘joint workspace’, a social realm in which the students’ dialogues are situated.

Keywords:

• interactive whiteboard
• group work
• physics
• dialogic space
• joint workspace

About the authors

Magnus Strøm Mellingsæter is a PhD candidate at Department of Physics, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, employed at Sør-Trøndelag University College. He has a master degree in physics education. His current PhD project is within the use of ICT tools in group work in physics.

Berit Bungum is associate professor at Department of Physics, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has a background in physics and holds a PhD about technology education. Her current work is within teacher training in physics and research in physics, science and technology education.