ABSTRACT
I hope that, having read the previous chapter, you are starting to share my belief that every primary classroom should be equipped with an interactive whiteboard, but sadly this is not a reality for many teachers. Yes, there has been a massive growth in the availability of this technology in the past few years but the encouraging figure, quoted in the previous chapter, that 63 per cent of primary schools have at least one interactive whiteboard, needs to be scrutinised more critically. One obvious thing to do is to look at that figure another way: 37 per cent of primary schools do not have an interactive whiteboard. The other issue to consider is the actual number of whiteboards in a typical primary school. Amongst those schools that do have interactive whiteboards, the mean number per school is 3.1 and of these schools 60 per cent have only one or two whiteboards. The implication is that many of the teachers in the 63 per cent of schools equipped with interactive whiteboards do not actually have regular access to one. So for many teachers the only option, when it comes to using ICT in their mathematics teaching, is the solitary desktop computer that is tucked away in the corner of the classroom.
