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| Sunday,13 November 2005 |
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Junior Observer |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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From Abroad Smart boards in the classroom Twenty-three middle-school children in the US state of Virginia got a combined lesson in current events, physical science and new technology when a cartoon boy named Tim and a robot called Moby answered the question, "Where do hurricanes come from?" Afterwards, students eagerly waved their hands in the air, hoping to get called on, so they could go up to an electronic board on the classroom wall and press a finger on the answer to questions such as: What is the region in the middle of a hurricane called? A) the eye, B) the mouth or C) the navel. "It's really cool. Instead of using the mouse, you can just touch the screen," Andrew Lai, 11, says after he taps the correct response-the eye prompting a loud checking sound from the board. The board, known as an interactive whiteboard, is a new tool that teachers in Virginia will be using this year. With its touch-sensitive screen hooked up to a projector and a desktop computer with Internet access, the 120-centimetre-wide screen is beginning to take the place of the chalkboard, paper handouts and even textbooks. Its online lessons move, talk and invite students to use their hands as well as their minds. This year, students in more than 150,000 schools around the world are returning to classrooms with interactive whiteboards. Teachers have found the boards especially useful in special education programmes and with students who have limited English proficiency, says Maribeth Luftglass, assistant superintendent and chief information officer for Virginia's schools. The more engaging and multimedia teaching approach can appeal to different learning styles and help students understand the concept behind lessons, even if they can't understand every word. But she says that funding can be scarce (rare) and that PTA funds or outside grants often are used to buy the boards, which cost between US$ 1,000 and $ 2,000. With the computer and projector, the price tag can rise to about $4,000. "These kids have grown up with technology. All they want to do is play on their PlayStations and GameBoys," says Travis Ivory, 29, the science teacher who used a whiteboard to give a lesson on hurricanes. "Anytime you pop in technology like that, they swallow it up." Ivory says he first used a whiteboard in North Carolina a few years ago and was impressed with how it held his students' attention. He also liked that the board could transform his hand written notes into typed text, and that he could save and reproduce the notes for a student who missed class by hitting "Print". He and an English teacher teamed up last year to apply for a grant to buy one of the boards. Cost is the primary barrier to acquiring the boards, says Nancy Knowlton, president and co-chief executive of Smart Technologies, the Canada-based inventor and vendor of the SMARTboard, a brand name for one of the interactive whiteboards. She says some schools have held bake sales or walkathons to purchase the equipment. The market has grown faster in England, where the government has set aside nearly $92 million to help schools buy interactive whiteboards as part of a larger effort to ramp up technology in classrooms, Knowlton says. Schools make up about 60 per cent of Smart Technologies' customers, but with faster Internet connections and the development of tools such as Web animation, the interactive boards have more and more applications. Many companies use them for video conferencing, and National Basketball Association teams have bought them, so coaches can replay videos of games and use electronic markers to draw plays, Knowlton says. Back in the science classroom, Ivory flashes through a slideshow of images that he had found online, documenting the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: school buses floating in water, the Superdome missing swaths of the rubber sheeting that once covered its roof, a broken bridge. While viewing an aerial photograph of the city, Ivory asks Lauren Hemphill, 11 to outline the streets-which now look like canals-with an electronic marker. "It's not just like reading out of a book," Lauren says. "You actually get to see what you're learning about." The Washington Post |
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