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classroom and it has now become a common device in the education (Greiffenhagen, 2002).
The IWB is the first electronic tool designed primarily for teaching,
which distinguishes it
from other technological tools used in the classrooms, such as computers and tablets, which
are mainly intended for learning purposes (Betcher and Lee, op cit).
There are many pedagogical affordances with the IWB.
The teacher can overwrite, underline,
highlight or circle text written on the IWB. The written texts can also be saved and used again
and
they are easy to read, because of the IWB’s capacity to magnify and zoom in and out.
Written text on the board can also be changed into typed text (Al-Saleem, 2012:131).
Furthermore, according to Betcher and Lee (op cit) the IWB makes it possible for teachers to
bring the wide range of resources from the web into the classroom in a convenient way. It
makes it possible to show anything displayed on the computer to the whole class at the same
time. Betcher and Lee (ibid) also argue that the IWB favours all sort of teaching such as
whole-class-, small group- and personalized-teaching (Betcher, Lee, ibid). Glover et al., (op
cit) claim that the IWB also supports different learning-styles such as
kinesthetic, visual,
audio, active,
and verbal-social
(Glover et al., ibid). Ellis (1997) claims that there is not one
distinct way for a person to learn and develop a second language. Different learners in various
situations acquire a language in different ways (Ellis, ibid: 4). Therefore, a device, which
supports all learning-styles and
connects all language skills, is assumed to be beneficial for
language learning. However, there have not been any research studies confirming if the IWB
has improved students’ achievements or enriched the present methods used
in language
teaching (Dudeney and Hockly, op cit). Furthermore, Betcher and Lee (op cit) argue that the
revolution is just in its first phase and success will come in pace with the teacher’s patience
and knowledge in mastering the tool (Betcher and Lee, ibid).
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