This research focuses on how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) can be effectively used to teach higher order thinking skills to primary preservice teachers in the history classroom. The case study finds that skills such as analysis, evaluation and inference constitute a valuable metalanguage that needs to be explicitly taught to preservice teachers. The IWB provides an effective stimulus for teaching this metalanguage insofar as it offers the user scaffolding affordances to plan and design higher order thinking (HOT) activities when otherwise the task can appear too difficult to achieve, especially for the younger preservice teachers. But risks await those preservice teachers who grant the technology a determinant model of materiality. (Contains 3 figures.)