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WANAQUE - Eighty SMART boards installed in classrooms
(by Teresa Edmond - Staff Writer - October 08, 2008)
WANAQUE - In an age when computers are staples in a classroom, the school district is thrilled about taking an extra step foward with technology by populating its classrooms with interactive whiteboards.
To help the community welcome nearly 80 SMART Boards into classrooms this month, an in-district technology teacher gave an overview of the interactive whiteboard SMART Board and how this instructive tool would bolster education.
Ryan Evans, Haskell School technology teacher, presented the SMART Board at the Sept. 24 Board of Education meeting. Evans has been using a SMART Board in his classroom for three years. Although Evans had a role in getting these boards into classrooms, he said he didn’t want the credit for bringing this idea to school officials.
“Teachers want them (the boards) because of the enhancement they bring to the classroom,” he said.
SMART Boards are interactive whiteboards that connect to computers. Whatever is displayed on the connecting computer’s screen is what will show up on the SMART Board.
The district paid a total of $350,000 for the boards and accompanying equipment like projectors. The SMART Boards are part of the $18 million school facilities upgrades to the Wanaque and Haskell schools. The district didn’t bring the SMART Boards into the classrooms last summer because school officials didn’t want the new equipment to get damaged during construction.
SMART Boards are manufactured by SMART Technologies, headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Specializing in technologies that boost the classroom experience, SMART Technologies first introduced these interactive whiteboards in 1991. That same year, SMART sold the world’s first interactive whiteboard to the University of Nevada.
Even though SMART Boards are equipped with compatible electronic markers and erasers that users can write on and clear the board with, teachers and students have other options. They can use a finger as a mouse, marker and eraser depending on what function is activated on the SMART Board’s toolbar.
SMART Boards would additionally help teachers better organize their notes and lesson plans. Teachers can create and save data like audio recordings and lesson plans and notes on the SMART Board. The boards enable their users to attach Web sites and documents from the Internet and download lesson plans from SMART Technologies’ Web site – smarttech.com.
SMART Boards further have a page sorter, where its users can display notes in the order they are taken. There’s also a gallery that contains lesson props and aids for teachers in every subject, Evans said. Such props include flags and maps for social studies and images of money for math.
“There’s something here for everyone – math, science, and there’s plenty more multimedia features here,” Evans said. “I could stay here all night and show you what’s in the gallery.”
As part of the district’s curriculum revision process, the revised curricula will include opportunities for the incorporation of technology including the SMART Boards. In addition, the new textbooks purchased to support the newly adopted curricula also take advantage of Web links and SMART Board technology. Once these boards are installed, teachers will be expected to incorporate the use of the SMART Boards into their lesson planning.
“This will be a work in progress,” he said. “This is the beginning.”
In addition, the district is ordering books that have online supplements that would be applied to computers, including SMART Boards.
Parent Karen Delsignori, who attended the school board meeting, said that the SMART Boards do push the classrooms into the 21st century, though she said it’s been a proven fact that schools were able to teach for years without them.
“It’s probably overdue because the technology existed a few years,” she said.
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