Interactive White Elephants

Interactive White Boards.  Big white Elephant.  Actually more to the point, expensive big white elephant with less utility than a white square painted on the wall.  Our white squares on the wall consume electricity and are serviced and repaired when the little green light goes out.  Not sure who notices they don’t work anymore, but some one comes to fix the most under utilized elephant ever to be delivered to a training establishment.  Why did the RN and for that matter a huge number of training establishments purchase these things??…..   cause they were shiny, advertised at education fairs and schools thought they were ace.  Which they are; If your a school teacher delivering Key Stage 1 maths or simple cat sat on the mat English.  The canny designers of the IWBs created ready made education tools, curriculum ready, as there was a mass market ready to dip their hands into government coffers and raid the nations piggy bank to deliver great, interactive lessons straight from CD.  For under pressure school teachers needing a quick and government approved lesson it made great sense.  Shame then, they didn’t look at Under graduate maths, compression cycles, diesels engines, fluid and thermos mechanics or anything the armed forces really teaches to its trainees.  If they had we could have profited in the same way.  However, our instructors are delivering in the classroom (much like their school teacher counter parts) and do not have the time, or indeed, the inclination to develop these high quality tools from scratch.  Where they have been developed, they are utilised, until the developer moves on and the course changes and no one knows how to make the necessary changes.  No worries, cause we still have nice white, power consuming squares on the wall that, if nothing else, look good.