Interactive Classroom Jan 08

VOLUME 3 | Issue 1 | JANUARY 2008

interactiveclassroom www.education.smarttech.com

Preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s world

B E T T F e at u r e

NEWS

SMART showcases Global hands-on learning at BETT Education Technology Visit SMART at stand G40 Summit

SMART brings the best of collaborative learning technology and digital content to BETT. Each year, educators from around the world converge in London to view the best in education technology products and resources. This year, visitors to the SMART stand G40 will be introduced to solutions that help teachers inspire extraordinary classroom moments. SMART’s contribution to the show, which takes place January 9–12, blends special events for educators with product announcements. As part of its ongoing quest to enable excellence in teaching, SMART introduces the SMART Learning Marketplace. Powered by Cambridge University Press and the Global Grid for Learning, the Marketplace is a content subscription service that allows teachers to quickly find and integrate digital resources into lesson activities. It offers over a million regularly updated and copyright-cleared images, video clips, audio files, text documents and manipulatives. Museums, top education publishers and technology and software educators from around the world contribute to the SMART Learning Marketplace library, providing a diverse selection of high-quality resources that are locally and globally relevant. The SMART Learning Marketplace is fully integrated with Notebook™ collaborative learning software. SMART will also introduce its enhanced version of Notebook software. With a multitude of practical features, an intuitive interface and thousands of learning resources, Notebook software is the

essential classroom software, used by millions of students around the world. It helps teachers easily create and effectively deliver lessons that are engaging for students. Version 10 has more than 30 new design and delivery features, so teachers can add even more interactivity and multimedia components to their lessons. BETT visitors can also try out the SMART Board™ 600i interactive whiteboard system. Combining a short-throw Unifi™ 45 projector and a SMART Board 600 series interactive whiteboard, the 600i allows teachers to easily access multimedia elements, such as videos and interactive demonstrations. The system helps teachers make lessons more appealing and encourages active participation. The SMART classroom audio system, to be introduced at BETT, ensures that lessons are heard above the daily activity of the classroom. It improves the quality and audibility of the teacher’s voice throughout the classroom, eliminating the strain that often accompanies a full day of talking to students. A visit to the SMART stand at BETT will also provide a glimpse of the future. Demonstrations of interactive tables and walls will give visitors a sense of the unlimited possibilities of interactive technology solutions. But SMART’s presence at BETT extends well beyond product demonstrations. SMART presentations, held regularly at the stand, let teachers see the practical application of products. Audience members come away inspired by new ideas for interactive lessons. Because SMART places a high priority on enabling the global discussion on ICT in education, the company hosts seminars at BETT for educators around the world. The seminars give attendees an opportunity to share ideas and good practices about how to integrate technology into the classroom. Whether BETT guests stop by the SMART stand for a product demonstration or attend a seminar, they will leave the show with a renewed enthusiasm for education technology. For further information on SMART at BETT, visit http://bett.smarttech.com. ic

Senior leaders in education, government

and business gathered at Global Education Technology Summit (GETS) in November 2007 to share their experiences on implementing ICT. This year’s event was a resounding success, as more than 140 delegates from countries such as Denmark, Malaysia, South Africa, Egypt and many others met in Calgary, Canada, for this four-day summit. Delegates found that this annual event was a unique opportunity to connect with peers. As delegates from around the world attended panel discussions and discussed common experiences, they collected ideas that will inform their ICT policies. Summit participants were many and varied. Some came to GETS to create new models for technology-enabled learning; others are beginning to build ICT-enabled schools. But all were eager to connect with other education officials and benefit from each other’s expertise and knowledge. And all took away valuable information from presentations, which tackled subjects such as developing ICT policies, building teachers’ skills and digital content strategies. ic

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Fix the gap

ICT in Moroccan education

A message from Nancy Knowlton

When I travel to London, I often take the Tube into the city. It is certainly economical, but more importantly, it can be a great timesaver. A couple of years ago I travelled overnight with a colleague. It was 4:00 a.m. Calgary time when an announcement came on the Tube for the third time – “Mind the gap.” Without so much as turning her head, my colleague said in a dry, tired voice, “Why don’t they just fix the gap?” There it was – elegant for its simplicity – an answer to the recurring warning. We are chronically warned about gaps in education – and gap is almost the perfect word to describe the issues. Because problems are discussed on a macro level, we sometimes forget that when a system fails, real individuals suffer. They suffer from lower socioeconomic status, poorer health and lower life expectancy. Almost nothing is as good in life for people who have a lesser or inadequate education. We all know the basics necessary to create and sustain an excellent education system. There are knowledgeable and insightful educators in virtually every jurisdiction around the world. The failure to deliver an excellent system often comes down to leadership and money – two things I hear about regularly. Nowhere is it easy to effect change or take a new direction. Risks abound, as do critics and naysayers, and we can never trivialise the budget issue. A child has but one chance at a great education – let’s fix the gaps. ic Nancy Knowlton is the CEO of SMART Technologies. Her biography is available online at www.smarttech.com/knowlton.

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ICT in education, according to Latifa El Abida, Morocco’s secretary of state for scholar education, is not a fashion accessory, but rather a toolbox to empower the learner and bring interactivity to the classroom. When it comes to explaining the role ICT plays in transforming the state of Moroccan education, El Abida believes in the importance of combating illiteracy, modernising and streamlining education management, and strengthening the ways of achieving equal opportunities and gender equality. “In brief,” says El Abida, “our challenge is to improve the quality of education in order to reduce the scholar failure and guarantee quality teaching and learning for all.” In a career that began in the classroom in 1973, El Abida has assumed a variety of roles in the government of Morocco. Since 1996, she has worked for the national department of education and has continually striven to reform Moroccan education. Quite simply, El Abida wants to bring Moroccan education into the 21st century. Her initiatives include increasing enrolment, decreasing the digital divide between urban and rural areas, and building a nationwide technology infrastructure. She also plans to construct a technology-based teacher-training platform, produce digital education content and provide state-of-the-art multimedia rooms with Internet access for every Moroccan student. The achievements of El Abida and her peers are nothing short of astonishing. In 1991, only 52 per cent of Moroccan children between the ages of six and eleven years old attended school, and by 2004, the country’s enrolment rate reached 92.2 per cent. Via a national program called Genie, which seeks to introduce technology into primary schools and upward, nearly 2,000 schools and over 30 training centres were outfitted with multimedia rooms by mid-2007. That constitutes the introduction of about 27,300 computers to the youth of Morocco. Since the inception of the Genie program, over 4,300 teachers have received training in ICT and another 9,000 have begun the process. SMART Board interactive whiteboards will be used to train many of these teachers.

The changes being realised in Morocco due to the proliferation of ICT are, in El Abida’s view, bringing about equal opportunities and equal access for all children. “The principal objective of the integration of ICT into Moroccan schools is precisely to facilitate democratic access to knowledge,” El Abida says. “We believe that ICT will provide access to information in rural areas and will also enable people in these areas to be attuned to any educational innovation. We hope that these technologies serve the human development by the various services they provide and thus reduce the gap between the rural and urban areas.” El Abida insists a quality education can and should go beyond simply preparing its youth to enter the job market, but rather to help them become global citizens, steeped in the “fundamental and universal values, such as love, peace and respect for others.” The goal of Moroccan education, she asserts, is to “provide a knowledge base that would enable our students to build the skills necessary to continuously deepen their knowledge independently.” Given her results to date, Moroccans can expect the standards of education to soar under El Abida’s guidance. ic

news

Multilingual lesson activities As more and more schools

around the world adopt SMART Board interactive whiteboards, educators have begun to see the need to share learning objects and lesson activities in their own languages. To fill this need, SMART has developed more than 400 new Adobe ® Flash® -enriched lesson activities in Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. These Notebook software-based lesson activities complement the current library of English activities already available on SMART’s website and enable more teachers around the world to present interactive lessons to their students. To view the lesson activities, visit http://education.smarttech.com/intla. ic

C a se St u dy

Tsaritsino Education Center #548 Moscow, Russia Premier Russian school chooses SMART solutions to create technology-rich environment Winner of Russia’s School of the Future contest, Tsaritsino Education Center #548 was among the first education institutions to recognise the value and necessity of interactive technology for learning and teaching. The school has long emphasised the value of ICT and has worked hard to deliver a technology-rich education. The equipment and resources that teachers and students of Tsaritsino Education Center use every day were bought not only with funds provided by the state but – for the greater part – with the money raised by the trustees. The investment reflects the center’s belief that a school should be able to meet the demands of contemporary society through the use of innovative technology. Tsaritsino Education Center has been using SMART Board interactive whiteboards for five years, and teachers have become accustomed to the advantages of the versatile and easy-to-use technology. Lyudmila Afanasyeva, head of the organisation department and biology teacher, says that SMART products helped to solve several problems. Teachers had found it difficult to blend

products such as computers, video players and projectors. They had to move back and forth between the computer and the projector, load or unload the video player and switch between media. The SMART Board interactive whiteboard simplified the process by making multimedia components easy to control. Another challenge that all Russian schools face is the amount of information to be taught and learned. To stay on top of the intensive workload, students must attend classes diligently, so being absent is a problem. “For those who can’t attend my classes, I send the notes I made on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard in an e-mail or save them on a disk,” says Afanasyeva. “It’s also important for me to save my class activities because I can use them for other lessons, and rework and improve them.” There has been a significant change in students’ attitudes toward learning since the new technology was implemented. Fourteen-year-old Nastya says, “We use the SMART Board interactive whiteboard in computer graphics lessons to create pictures you can’t draw with a mouse. And when we have free time we also draw on the whiteboard because it’s fun.” Tsaritsino continues to grow and succeed with teachers using accessible technology solutions and students eager to learn. “Our school was chosen as the best school in Russia,” says Afanasyeva. “In many ways it is thanks to the impact made by SMART Board interactive whiteboards.” ic

Students at Tsaritsino Education Center love to create their own projects on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.

“Our school was chosen as the best school in Russia. In many ways it is thanks to the impact made by SMART Board interactive whiteboards.” – Lyudmila Afanasyeva, teacher and head of the organisation department at Tsaritsino Education Center #548

news

SMART World Teachers’ Day Video Contest winner

Teacher Lisa McCallum and some of the children in her kindergarten class at St. Therese Primary School in Sydney, Australia, proudly display a letter from SMART CEO Nancy Knowlton informing them that they are the overall winner in the SMART World Teachers’ Day Video Contest.

Chilean school pioneers SMART products Escuela Municipal D–11 Valle del Inca in Santiago is the first Chilean public school to have a SMART Board interactive whiteboard in every classroom. With enthusiastic teachers willing to implement new teaching methodologies, the school is serving as a shining example of technology integration to other schools in the country. The primary school integrated interactive whiteboards, projectors and computers into their 17 classrooms after seeing the positive results of a SMART Board interactive whiteboard project at the University of Santiago. Teachers wanted to provide the best education experience possible to their 550 students, many who come from underprivileged families. With financial aid from the Conchali municipality, they were able to begin using the technology tools in

October 2006. They anticipate that interactive whiteboards will increase attendance and improve the learning process. ic

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Interactive whiteboards produce significant results

SMART opens new assembly plant The story of SMART’s dynamic growth

A new report by the Education and Social

Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, indicates that increasing students’ exposure to interactive whiteboards significantly and positively impacts student achievement. The report, “Evaluation of the Primary Schools Whiteboard Expansion Project,” is based on a two-year study of the former Department for Education and Skills’ (DfES) Primary Schools Whiteboard Expansion project (PSWE). The DfES provided £10 million to 21 local authorities in 2003–2004 for the project in an effort to support the implementation and continued use of interactive whiteboards in primary schools in England. From September 2004 to December 2006, researchers studied the impact interactive whiteboards had on students in maths, English and science subjects. Over 7,000 primary students in 20 local authorities were evaluated, and more than 60 per cent of interactive whiteboards in the study were SMART Board interactive whiteboards. The findings over the course of two years were significant, especially in maths and science. Most students in Key Stage 2 mathematics

made the equivalent of 2.5 to 5 months’ additional progress. In Key Stage 1 mathematics, high-attaining females made additional gains of 4.75 months. Most of the students evaluated in Key Stage 1 and 2 science made greater progress with two years’ exposure to interactive whiteboards, and some students made as much as 7.5 months’ additional progress. The study also found that interactive whiteboards had a significant impact on teachers’ daily lives: • Eighty-nine per cent of 363 teachers said that the interactive whiteboard had a positive impact on their lesson preparation • Many teachers felt the interactive whiteboards allowed them more opportunities for assessment • The majority of teachers felt they could make better use of the interactive whiteboard by the end of the school year The Manchester Metropolitan University study gives further support to the growing body of research about the practical benefits of interactive whiteboards in the classroom. To read the entire study, visit www.becta.org.uk. ic

SMART Technologies Corporate headquarters | Phone 1.403.245.0333 | Fax 1.403.228.2500 www.smarttech.com | www.education.smarttech.com | www.smarterkids.org © 2008 SMART Technologies ULC. All rights reserved. SMART Board, Notebook, Unifi, smarttech and the SMART logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SMART Technologies ULC in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other third-party company names and products are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Printed in Canada 12/2007.

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turned another page on October 25, 2007, in Kanata, Ontario, near Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. Government officials, suppliers, customers and the media were on hand to see SMART’s executive chairman and co-founder, David Martin, officially open the company’s new 24,000 square-metre assembly and warehousing facility. The building brings together current operations that had been spread across three locations, and adds considerable space and capacity to handle future growth. Over 400 SMART employees work in a state-of-the-art environment that includes space for assembly, warehousing, research and development, and administration, along with staff amenity space. SMART is also expanding its world headquarters in Calgary, Alberta, with construction of a new 17,187 square-metre building that began in September 2006 and is slated for completion in the summer of 2008. ic

ICT discourse at the heart of SMART’s vision SMART helps shape the global discourse on education technology by supporting and participating in key events around the world that focus on ICT in education. Among the education technology conferences that SMART sponsored in 2007 were Educ@TICE in Paris, France, and Online Educa Berlin in Germany. In addition to sponsoring Denmark’s Uddannelsesforum, SMART’s CEO, Nancy Knowlton, was keynote speaker. These conferences are just a sample of the forums that enable SMART to immerse itself in the world of ICT in education. ic