The interactive whiteboard: tool and/or agent of semiotic mediation

Technologies such as interactive whiteboards, laptops, wireless connectivity and personal communications devices mark the educational zeitgeist. Their proliferation in schools is an emergent theme in educational research, yet, the impact on pedagogic discourse is less understood. This paper reports on a case study of one teacher’s work to integrate an interactive whiteboard (IWB) into a new purpose-built teaching space. The case study is part of a larger project-in-progress which seeks to record and understand how primary school teachers use new technologies in their daily literacy sessions. Treating the literacy session as an instance of a curriculum genre (Christie, 2002), the paper describes the unfolding pedagogy as teacher, students and technology interact in the construction of literate knowledge.