The use of a digital monitor in the teaching of D&T

I’ve been teaching D&T for the best part of 25 years now. I remember walking into my first classroom as a NQT. Desks laid out in rows with the teachers teacher’s desk front and centre; behind which was both a chalkboard and a ‘whiteboard’ to be used with dry wipe marker pens. On the corner of the teachers’ desk perched an OHP with a pack of acetate sheets next to it and some Staedtler fine line acetate pens (multiple colours). In a subject like D&T, where a lot of what is taught is communicated through sketching, the ability to present accurately and quickly was something that I had to develop or risk having restless students with idle hands.

I preferred the whiteboard. Sketching with chisel tipped marked pens was easier and far more presentable than trying to achieve similar outcomes with chalk. I still love drawing on whiteboards. There is something personal to it and it demonstrates to the students that you can actually do what you are asking them to. Done well there is a ‘wow’ factor with well-drawn presentations on that scale also.

In the last 25 years or so the amount of technological teacher aids hasn’t increased that spectacularly. 

There was a spell where ‘smart’ boards were introduced. They were clunky, constantly needed calibrating and the ‘pens’ that came with it were very expensive and easy to lose/have stolen by either colleagues or students.

I remember during lockdown making use of a visualizer to record short videos for students to teach them perspective sketching. Visualizers are pretty useful if you want to show a small-scale example accurately to a large audience. Drawbacks would include being isolated at your desk while you demonstrate and also it’s a bit difficult to simply ’undo’ a mistake when you’re ’going live’ so to speak.

And so, to the latest bit of kit that has arrived in my classroom. The interactive monitor/viewboard. I was very sceptical at first as historically I have found smart or interactive boards to be counter intuitive and more a hinderance than helpful to me.

The screen is also set up to be interactive to touch. So long as the software you are interacting with is fairly simple then this function can be quite useful. In D&T a lot of the software is complex. Photoshop and Fusion for example do not work well if you are trying to demonstrate or operate using the touchscreen rather than keyboard and mouse.

The monitor comes with a magnetic stylus which attaches on the front of the screen (great until another teacher or student ‘borrows’ it) which I have found useful when I want to annotate a piece of exemplar work to a class. You can use multiple colours and highlighters but there are no straight line or geometry tools in this ‘mode’ if you wanted to draw arrows or boxes to highlight something specific.

Where this piece of technology has really won me over though is in the ‘viewboard’ mode (like a digital whiteboard). I am only just getting familiar with this but, for the technical drawing skills that we deliver to students especially, this is a game changer.

The ability to quickly and accurately draw in Isometric or perspective using the range of tools available is so powerful.

In this mode you can select subject specific backgrounds. If you cannot find a suitable pre-loaded one you can create and upload a bespoke one. I created an Isometric grid using Photoshop, and this is now saved into the viewboard memory. 

The range of drawing tools is extensive. You can change line weights, styles and colours quickly and easily. Mistakes are simple to edit and you can create as many work screens as you want and flick between them to demonstrate different things during a class.

The ability to go backward and forward through the work that has just been done is useful. It enables you to repeatedly revisit the stages of the process that you want students to undertake. Something that you can’t do without rubbing out and redrawing on a traditional whiteboard.

Work can be saved to use with a different class at a future date. Work can be partially rendered using the highlighter tool and text added to improve communication. Don’t get me wrong, its not even close to marker pens on a piece of paper but it serves a purpose.

My only criticism of the viewboard mode, especially when sketching, is that there is no simple way of drawing anything other than straight lines or geometry. So, if you needed to draw ellipses or curves for a perspective demonstration, you’re going to be stuck.

Overall, this digital monitor has been a huge upgrade on previous tech that I have used over the years. It’s intuitive and your exemplar demonstrations will look amazing (so long as you don’t want to draw cylinders). I still have a small whiteboard and I do still use it for the more organic shape demonstrations.

I think the best way to see the digital monitor is as another tool to help deliver skills and knowledge. Knowing when and how to use it best is down to the individual.