At Grover Middle School one recent morning, students in Seamus Dowling’s fourth period eighth grade social studies class were busy analyzing maps depicting changes in China’s leadership and boundaries from the years A.D. 250 through 560.##M:[more]##
But drawing on those maps using various colors to help materialize their analyses did not require the use of traditional pen and paper, a chalk board, or even a white board, for that matter.
Instead, students were using one of the district’s 50 SMARTboards, an invention that seems to render all of those other things obsolete while revolutionizing the way students here learn.
A SMARTboard is a large, touch-controlled screen that works with a computer and projector that throws the computer’s desktop onto the interactive board. The school district bought a few for last year as a test, and purchased more for this school year, as part of its differentiated teaching initiative. Grover Middle School has about a half a dozen of these machines, and students’ enthusiasm for learning has extensively grown, Dowling said.
Essentially, the teacher’s computer screen is projected onto a large, interactive electronic board, where it becomes usable by anyone. Once the screen is up, students and teachers use their fingers to click and drag, draw, search the Internet, create and open documents, save their work for future reference, examine maps, watch DVDs, and practically everything else one would be able to do on a personal computer.
For example, in Dowling’s class, students went up to the “board,” where they took turns circling various sections of the map using different colors. One student went up to the board and picked up the blue “marker” and drew a circle around the Yellow Sea using digital ink.
When picked up, the marker lights up, signaling that the computer understands to show the student’s tracings in blue. When the marker is placed back in its holder, the light turns off until another marker is picked up. Once a new marker is selected, whatever is drawn on the screen — whether it’s by finger or by marker — will appear in that marker’s color.
And for those who might not have the steadiest hand, the eraser — which operates in a similar fashion — can erase the slightest marks to the map without damaging the whole drawing.
But the board serves a myriad of other purposes. Gone are the days when note-taking meant having to erase a chalkboard, permanently removing anything written to make room for new material. A teacher or student can create a document in class and save it to the hard drive — or place it on the Internet — and later reopen it for reference, additions, or changes. One can even open a Web browser, copy a photo from a site, and place it into a document, where drawings or notes can be made on top or beside it. The board also has an interactive touch-screen keyboard.
Perhaps the most innovative feature that Dowling pointed out is that students can move objects drawn on the board around the screen by dragging them with their finger.
Dowling was one of the first teachers in the district to get a SMARTboard, and it’s partly because he brought the idea to Superintendent Victoria Kniewel two years ago, when she served as the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction. He said he thought the SMARTboard was a way to bring differentiated instruction into the classroom and continue with the district’s goal of having technology-infused classrooms.
District technology director Rick Cave said teachers and administrators saw a lot of potential in the SMARTboards, which is the reason the district purchased more, bringing the total of SMARTboards spread evenly around the district’s schools to about 50.
Because district officials installed the smartboards themselves, they only cost a little over $2,”000 apiece. Some of the money came from grants the district received for various educational programs tied to the smartboards’ use, and some of the district’s schools also chipped in money to offset the costs, Cave said.
“It puts all the resources at your fingertips in a place that’s very easy to control and manage,” said Cave. “We don’t want this to turn into another way for teachers to stand in front and present. We want this to become a tool everyone can use.”
Dowling, who is in his second year of using the SMARTboard, agrees. He emphasized that his philosophy is that it can’t become teacher-centered.
“This is a going-forward skill; the more (students) can get on it, the better,” he said. Some students’ parents use SMARTboards as part of their jobs, and students who learn how to use them at school now can be a step ahead when they enter the working world later, he said.
Because he can also scan exemplary work from students onto the computer, and thus onto the SMARTboard, it has also become a tool to “make something that only you and the student can have and make it universal,” which can also show students that kids their own age are capable of doing great work. Of course, Dowling says he does block out the name on the assignment, as to ensure students won’t be singled out.
And the tool is perfect for students who are active learners, or who “just have to do it to learn it,” he said.
Students, he said, “are enamored with it,” as most of them are technical kids who tend to be more attentive to multimedia. “Kids gravitate to that more than a newspaper article that’s just text.”
