Long-time Academy teacher John Storjohann shares the evolution of instructional technology and how students are benefitting from new Promethean Boards in each classroom.
In the mid-1990s, SmartBoards were introduced into the classrooms of the Academy of the Sacred Heart, offering the promise of new levels of student engagement through interactive technology. And while the concept of a SmartBoard held great potential, the reality was that the technology behind the boards offered its own challenges. It was essentially simply a projection of the instructor’s computer screen, required almost daily recalibration to be used effectively as a whiteboard, and as the Academy upgraded to larger, higher-resolution monitors, even calibration became an exercise in frustration; what you “wrote” on the SmartBoard would appear several inches away because of the difference between screen resolution and the board’s resolution. SmartBoards were, in essence, grand ideas that were let down by a combination of rapidly evolving technology and the inherent limitations of the boards themselves.
Promethean Boards that were in our classrooms as we began Faculty Orientation in August are more revolutionary than evolutionary in the execution of the promise that SmartBoards promised for the classroom. Promethean Boards are like a giant, relocatable tablet computer that acts as a second monitor to not only the instructor’s computer but to any computer in the room through the ability to share access with any student.
With that ability, students are not just spectators; they’re co-creators and co-instructors, their fingers controlling their coding projects as we debug their scripts as a class, or as they show off and modify their 3D creations in TinkerCAD, or deliver their presentations in PowerPoint. Promethean Boards increase the degree of collaborative learning, student engagement, and creativity. You can open an Internet browser to research information or access online curriculum and then use the annotate tool to highlight information or add notes in real-time. The multi-window feature built into the boards allow you to open a video clip in one window and have the interactive whiteboard open in the other to take notes while simultaneously watching the video clip. Teachers (or students) can also create whiteboard files and save them to internal storage or cloud storage for easy access. You can bring up timers, calculators, geometry tools – all with the touch of the control panel while never leaving the front of the room. Even my youngest students are immediately comfortable when using one (it’s like a giant iPad to them!).
We’re just weeks into the school year and I feel like I’m only beginning to scratch the potential of these new boards. They’re not just screens; they’re a canvas for creativity, learning, and sharing; it’s the interactive tool I’ve been hoping for for some time.
