ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how the interactive whiteboard (IWB), which can help teachers offer this opportunity, presenting a space for children to communicate their ideas visually and for a class to build up knowledge together. The IWB additionally allows multimodal interaction with a wide range of digital media. The chapter shows that the way for both teachers and pupils to use this powerful and increasingly prevalent tool more interactively. It focuses on research carried out by a team at Cambridge University. The chapter explores some of the resulting classroom practices with varied, concrete examples backed up by a freely accessible collection of video clips. Using the IWB interactively can support rich new forms of classroom dialogue in which teachers and learners together explore, build on and critique each other's ideas. Classroom dialogue in the context of IWB use is construed as being facilitated by teachers and learners constructing and manipulating digital objects together, in conjunction with talk and gesture.
