Teachers’ Perceptions of the Interactive Boards for Teaching and Learning: The Case of Arab Teachers in Israel

Literature Review

Researchers point that interactive boards help change, improve or add to the teaching methods of teachers who use them in the classroom (Cuthell, 2002; Latham, 2002; Levy, 2002 & Jones & Vincent, 2010). Cuthell (2002), for example, administered a questionnaire in internet sites about teachers' opinions regarding the use of interactive boards in learning in elementary and middle schools. The findings show that when the interactive boards are installed in the classrooms and when the teachers have the required skills for using those interactive boards, a technological environment will be created which will support teachers and enable the transformation of their teaching methods to ones that are appropriated for the diverse population of their students.

Interactive boards add more resources and strategies to the teaching methods of teachers, enabling them to use more efficiently learning resources (Cuthell, 2002; Glover & Miller, 2001; Campbell & Kent, 1998; Levy, 2002). At the same time, they help teachers provide the students with more challenging learning opportunities (Latham, 2002). Levy (2002), for example, found that teachers looked at the interactive boards as aiding in presenting information and learning resources (as the easiness with which it is possible to draw on a greater number and wider variety of information and learning resources), in facilitating classroom interaction and activity (as freeing up time for interaction and task-related activity), and in their educational impact (as helping teachers to give more effective explanations).

Interactive boards not only contribute to the teacher but to the student too, supporting his learning - enabling understanding, concentrating, presenting information, remembering, thinking processes, and causing motivation (Kuzminsky, 2008; Levy, 2002; Schmid, 2008; Wall, Higgins, & Smith, 2005); stimulating learning - through increasing motivation, fun, self confidence, attention, and interest (Beeland, 2002; Wall, Higgins, & Smith, 2005); providing preferred learning approaches - through supporting different learning styles: visual, audio, verbal-social, and kinesthetic (Schmid, 2008; Wall, Higgins, & Smith, 2005); making students involved more interactively in learning and more focused on the learning material (Latham, 2002; Levy, 2002); enabling connectedness in an easy way - with the software, the hardware, and the multimedia (Wall, Higgins, & Smith, 2005); enabling wide range of learning resources and materials (Cuthell, 2002; Schmid, 2008) and increasing the student’s achievement (Kuzminsky, 2008; Lewin et al., 2008).