Pace, interactivity and multimodality in teachers’ design of texts for interactive whiteboards in the secondary school classroom

Abstract

Teachers making texts for use in the classroom is nothing new, it is an established aspect of pedagogic practice. The introduction of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) into UK secondary schools has, however, impacted on this practice in a number of ways. Changes in the site of design and display—from the printed page or worksheet and the blackboard to the electronic site of the screen, together with easy access to multimodal resources, including colour, image, sound and movement—bring new potentials for teacher text design for IWBs. The texts designed and used with IWBs can be viewed as a meeting point for the agenda of educational policy, the interests of the commercial sector, teachers’ pedagogic concerns and the facilities of technology. Pace, interactivity and multimodality are converged on by policy and research literature as key benefits of IWBs for pedagogy. In this article, we discuss teachers’ design of IWB texts with a focus on these three resources. Drawing on three illustrative examples of IWB use in secondary schools maths, we examine how these resources are articulated and mediated in the classroom through teachers’ text design. We highlight the role of teachers in digital text design and the potential of text design as a pedagogic tool for change (and non‐change). We conclude that pedagogic text design for IWBs would benefit from a more nuanced approach to these (and other) resources that foregrounds pedagogy and backgrounds technology.