Key Findings

The key findings from the project included:

• The author made three observations which led to the development of the guide: First, as tutors/teachers isolated in the classroom, it is easy to be unaware of colleagues ‘masterful’ teaching. Secondly, digital technology and blended learning has the potential to improve students’ learning by allowing virtually free repetition of delivery and the possibility of providing for a greater range of learning styles. Finally, the digital white board has meant that it is easy to seamlessly capture lessons for further use.
• The intention of the guide is to show tutors and teachers that sharing ideas about teaching and learning can be fun, surprisingly effective and cheap. By making sets of video clips that are well designed and easy to access, good practice may be shared with other teachers of the same topics or with their students as revision.
• The reusable teaching object (RTO) created by the process described through completion of this project, enhanced students’ learning of numeracy by creating images and virtual 3D constructs. The students learn the specific skill of using maths and geometry to build stairs but more generally to recognise numeracy as a problem-solving skill that they may be able to apply in other contexts. The value and appeal of developing numeracy skills will also be more convincingly demonstrated.
• This project contributes to the improvement of teaching practice by providing a structure in which tutors are able to reflect on practice while working through the guidelines presented in the report and think about how to structure their lesson in a way that is able to be captured and logically recreated as an RTO. Therefore, this project contributes to more methodical development of learning resources based on sound pedagogical theory.

Key Recommendations

The key recommendations from the project included:

Assistance with the development of quality resources | Tutors/trainers often need to develop resources themselves or with limited support. The guidelines provided in this project, provide a process to assist with the development of quality resources for use with and without IWB. This may lead to an increase in the pool of freely available and shared quality multimedia teaching resource packages. Successful use of the guidelines developed here has the potential to enable talented tutors currently working in isolation to share some of their talent.

Integrating the IWB into practice | As the technology that this project is based on becomes more widely available, practitioners will benefit from the availability of RTOs and guidelines to help ‘integrate’ the IWB into practice and ultimately, potentially ‘transform’ teaching into a rich and dynamic multimedia interaction with students.