I have a dirty secret. It’s something I’m so ashamed to admit to that I’ve been hiding it for years. I am afraid of interactive whiteboards. The fear isn’t of the technology involved. It’s that I’m going to break it.

A long time ago, when I first started teaching, I ruined a regular whiteboard by writing on it with a permanent marker (they look just like regular board markers, OK?). In the end, we were able to repair it but the embarrassment in class when I wasn’t able to wipe off what I had written on the board is something that will stick with me for a long time.

The first time I saw an interactive whiteboard, I instantly thought “OMG, what if I write on it in permanent marker and ruin it?”. Since then, I have tried my best to avoid them and succeeded until quite recently.

Although I wanted iPads for our department, it looks like we’re getting interactive whiteboards. So, last week, I decided to take one for a test drive with a friend. After checking the labels on the markers (they really do look similar), I approached the board. To my surprise, I found that one of the best things about interactive whiteboards is that if you are well prepared, quite often you don’t actually need board markers. Obviously, there are different types of interactive whiteboards but if the ones we’re getting are anything like the one I had a go on, I think I’m going to enjoy using them.

I’ve seen some great MFL Powerpoint presentations that would work well on an interactive whiteboard and using real-life examples is going to be a lot easier than it was using the DVD player (whenever I was able to wrestle it away from ‘Scary Sue’).

I feel like I’m on a roll with overcoming fears now. Next week, I think I’ll try and get over my fear of crashing into windows.

On the technogrouch / compukeenie scale, I’d say I rate at about eight. I’m not fully iTeacher-tronic yet, but I’m well on the way. That’s why Apple’s iPad caught my eye (save the fanboy-bashing comments until the end, please).

Despite also being the name for a kind of incontinence pad in Japan (possibly aimed at long-suffering kancho victims), I think the iPad could have some fantastic applications in the MFL classroom.

Once people start developing integrated learning applications for it, I’m sure the iPad will be a step ahead of the computers we currently use in language labs for a number of reasons.

Firstly, they’re portable. As long as the students don’t nick them, this would solve loads of problems with assigning classrooms. Rather than fighting over who gets to use the language lab, then having to shuffle our classrooms around accordingly, we can just fight over who gets to use the iPads.

Secondly, they’re locked and can only use one application at a time. Students can’t quickly flip back from Facebook to vocabulary matching when you look over their shoulders so they’re less likely to get distracted.

Thirdly, students like cool gadgets. Whether we like them or not, I don’t know many teenagers who would prefer to work on a clunky desktop than an iPad.

What about the price, though? They’re listed as retailing at $499 (about £320). Now, when you factor in an educational discount of £70 or so (depending on what kind of potential Apple sees in educational sales) it starts to look like a more attractive option when compared to even the most basic language lab computers.

Now, all of these ideas are based on having a wireless network that actually works. if you have a reasonable signal, though, the easy set up (if it’s anything like the iPod touch) of wireless from the user standpoint could help classes run more smoothly and mean fewer callouts for ‘Tony the tecchie’ or whoever else runs the IT in your school.

I’ve banged on about my hatred for all things technical before. I spend more man hours calling technicians, re-planning lessons, moving classrooms and trying to fix problems when the whiteboard has a nervous breakdown and blinks angrily at me, than actually teaching.

This article in the Evening Standard today by Richard Godwin totally and brilliantly echoes my thoughts. He notes that Blair was all about investing in schools, but he invested lots of money and time and pointless white papers in computers and ICT Initiatives. And where is the investment in teaching, or pay, or comfy chairs, or the coffee in the staffroom? You know, stuff that really matters.

And now, the headteacher of the Brunel Academy in Bristol – the government’s flagship wireless school (whoopee) has said that technology is defunct. And pointless. And they’ve given up and are using pens and paper again. He actually called technology a ‘white elephant.’ That guy is switched on.

I wish I worked there. I hate my whiteboard. And my laptop. I hate the crappy wireless connection in my classroom that only works if I have exactly 12 pupils in there, all crowded round me by the back window, and I’m on one leg holding the laptop up to the light, akin to the Statue of Liberty – but, much less liberated.

I want to break up with technology. I am in a destructive relationship with it; one with occasionally violent episodes that usually ends in me cutting my finger on the broken pieces of another laptop i’ve accidentally thrown on the floor in a furious rage. “So, sorry technology, this is just working anymore. We’re just in different places, you know, I need to be able to write the homework up for my kids without having to call Tony the tecchie guy, and you’re more concerned with crashing, just after I’ve finished writing 25 reports. And not saved them.

We want different things. I want you to work. You don’t want to work. It’s over.”

Have decided to drag myself to BETT – apparently it promises much goodness in the way of ‘innovative technology’ and apparently I need to be more innovative (I really hate that word).

English isn’t really a subject that lends itself well to technology of any kind – being about, you know, old books and stuff – it’s more about the turning of the page and the craft of the ancient text. But I do keep seeming to be at the wrong end of the deputy head’s wrath when our ‘IT Agenda’ is discussed, and am hoping that BETT can give me enough ideas to get her off my back for a few months.

But seriously – an IT ‘agenda’? FFS – can’t we just use computers and whiteboards and blackberries and be done with it? Why do we have to have a specifc laid out plan, with milestones, targets and endless, endless - so endless - reports on our success? I spend more bloody time writing reports on how IT is becoming part of my teaching, than actually teaching.

Last term I wasted at least 35 lesson hours, on a malfunctioning whiteboard (it just kept flashing one powerpoint slide at me in this desperately sad way); several millions of my own personal hours on trying to plan lessons while my computer kept turning itself off for no explicable reason; and have recieved no less than 47 homework excuses that were blamed on technology.  “Sir, my laptop ate my homework etc.”

Not that I don’t believe them, my computer constantly hides work from me that I’m sure I spent ages doing. Bastard.