Interactive Classroom July 08

VOLUME 3 | Issue 3 | JULY 2008

interactiveclassroom education.smarttech.com

Preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s world

N ECC F e at u r e

SMART showcases education solutions at NECC 2008 material and the SMART Learning Marketplace, a subscription service that offers over one million images, manipulatives and multimedia files. Educators also learned about the Lesson Activity Toolkit, which offers customizable tools and templates to help teachers create professional and engaging lessons.

Professional development and community

SMART’s booth

was a busy place over the course of the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), held in San Antonio, Texas, from June 29 to July 2. It was SMART’s tenth year at NECC, showcasing SMART’s easy-to-use education solutions. These encompass hardware, software, classroom content, resources, and support and services that help teachers make a difference in their students’ education and a positive impact on their learning outcomes. Billed as one of the world’s most comprehensive education technology events, NECC 2008 gave SMART an opportunity to demonstrate and share the transformative powers of SMART products in education.

SMART products The full range of SMART’s products were on display in SMART’s booth. Educators learned more about the SMART Board™ 680i system, the Senteo™ interactive response system, the AirLiner™ wireless slate and SMART software such as SynchronEyes™ classroom management software and SMART Ideas™ concept-mapping software.

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For many, NECC offered the first introduction to the SMART Document Camera, which displays real-time images of physical objects and instantly turns them into interactive content for lessons. Educators displayed much interest in new products such as SMART Notebook software 10 with more than 30 new features; SMART Audio, a classroom amplification system that magnifies sound and distributes it evenly throughout a classroom; and the SMART Board interactive display frame, which makes plasma displays interactive and uses a new SMART pencil concept. The newest version of Senteo assessment software, with many new features that make classroom assessment easier and better, also attracted much attention.

Content and resources SMART offers thousands of teacher-created and SMART-created lesson activities with interactive features and colorful, engaging content. A dedicated area for content and resources within the SMART booth familiarized educators with this

Teachers who attended NECC were excited about the chance SMART’s education solutions give them to connect with their peers and get access to professional development opportunities. SMART offered extensive information on the SMART Exchange, SMART’s YouTube and TeacherTube channels, and professional development programs such as the SMART Exemplary Educator program. Teachers showed tremendous interest in the SMART Exchange (exchange.smarttech.com), a large and engaged community of teachers who use SMART products and are eager to share their insights and experiences to connect and collaborate. This group of educators, whose passion for teaching and enthusiasm for technology is contagious, is helping us create one of the most vibrant education communities on the Web. Teachers can even post their favorite lesson activities and download lesson activities created by others. This online community now has thousands of active members and is growing daily.

Services and support SMART offers a comprehensive range of training options, including industry-leading technical support. Teachers and administrators were keen to learn how our wide-ranging services and support enable effective and ongoing use of classroom technology. NECC gave SMART yet another opportunity to connect with teachers, technology coordinators, library media specialists, administrators and so many more. SMART received valuable input to help further develop products and services that improve learning and create extraordinary moments in the classroom. ic

C A S E STU DY

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Christopher Chong: New director for Asia-Pacific

SMART Technologies announces the appointment of Christopher Chong to the position of director, Asia-Pacific. The appointment reflects SMART’s commitment to provide more local support for customers and resellers in the region. In this newly created position, Chong will be in charge of the sales, marketing and services functions for SMART products, and overseeing interactions with customers in 11 countries, including China, Australia, South Korea and Malaysia. Chong’s mandate is to build a local team supporting SMART’s business and clients in the region. Based in Singapore, he will report to SMART’s president and COO, Tom Hodson. Since 2006, Chong has been SMART’s chief representative in China, managing the company’s sales support and marketing office in Shanghai. His appointment comes at a time when SMART is experiencing significant growth across the region and globally. “SMART has a sustained track record of outstanding growth and customer satisfaction in the Asia-Pacific region,” says Chong. “In this new position, I’m looking forward to driving that growth even further and building on SMART’s leadership position.” ic

SMART leads interactive whiteboard category in education SMART Technologies is the leading provider of interactive whiteboards to education institutions around the world, says a recently released report by Decision Tree Consulting (DTC), an industry-leading UK research company. The report states that nearly 57 percent of the interactive whiteboards installed worldwide are from SMART, nearly three times that of its closest competitor. According to DTC, 377,000 interactive whiteboards were sold to education institutions in 2007, with the most significant growth coming from the United States and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It forecasts that by 2011, one in six classrooms worldwide will feature an interactive whiteboard. ic

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Seeing literature in a new light Motivation and engagement help learning retention Robert College, a Turkish-American high school, has a long-standing tradition and history educating Turkey’s brightest minds. Offering instruction in English and Turkish, the high school is a resource-rich learning environment where teachers and students are encouraged to seek higher levels of knowledge and are offered a wide array of choices to do so. SMART Board interactive whiteboards have become the product of choice for teachers and students at Robert College partly because of their ease of use. Pelin Rau, a U.S.-educated language and literature teacher with 10-years’ experience, has used SMART Board interactive whiteboards for the last 6 years. Because the students she teaches are very much products of the digital age – the kind who take the Internet, video games and their MP3 players for granted – she believes they have become, for the most part, visual learners. “What I find is my students need to see the information and interact with it to internalize it,” Rau explains. She adds, “This is where the SMART Board plays a crucial role and fulfills a very important need on our learners’ part…. SMART Board interactive whiteboards motivate … our students to learn because they make learning visual, memorable, fun, interesting and therefore long-lasting.” Rau also finds the SMART Board interactive whiteboard helps her be a more effective teacher because it allows her to interact with lessons in a very hands-on way. As Rau says, the board provides “visual scaffolding,” for her students, strengthening and building language and thinking skills. “With the help of SMART Board interactive whiteboards, instruction moves away from being a passive, boring or remote matter and transforms itself into an interactive, engaging, enjoyable and relevant activity.” Integrating SMART products such as SMART Notebook software, which enables collaborative learning, into her teaching is both easy and rewarding. She routinely uses the interactive features of SMART Notebook to write over text read in class, and to save, edit and revise classroom notes so they can be accessed for review in later classroom sessions. When Rau employs SMART Notebook to visually represent abstract concepts in literature, such as graphic organizers to construct plot diagrams, her students find this approach very helpful in understanding the content. “The interactive features of the SMART Board encourage the learners to engage with the information so they can own their learning experiences. This makes knowledge potent

and permanent…. Improved motivation and higher interest in the subject-matter translate into higher student performance. The learners begin to gain pleasure from learning and start pursuing knowledge on their own. They accept responsibility for their own education and start to become independent thinkers and learners,” Rau explains. Although literature is often a conceptual field of study, with the aid of the SMART Board interactive whiteboard Rau teaches and presents even the most difficult and abstract of concepts in a visual manner, and makes these ideas accessible and understandable to the students of Robert College. ic

The class of 1957 signing their names on the interactive whiteboard.

“The interactive features of the SMART Board encourage the learners to engage with the information so they can own their learning experiences.” – Pelin Rau, language and literature teacher, Robert College High School, Istanbul, Turkey

R E S E ARC H R E P O RT

NEW PRODUCT

Whole-class teaching with interactive whiteboards...

Making the grade

...Leads to more learner participation

New Senteo software makes personalized instruction easier

Conclusion

Researchers in the United Kingdom

conducted a study to learn how teaching practices are developing and changing due to the increase of interactive whiteboard use in classrooms. The results were released in Learning, Media & Technology in September 2007. The researchers visited high school science classes where experienced teachers used interactive whiteboards as a teaching and learning tool. The report analyzed the strategies these teachers used to encourage the interactive participation of learners in whole-class activities. The study’s authors state that using interactive whiteboards for whole-class teaching gives teachers an avenue to support and increase intersubjectivity with their students, which, in a classroom context is defined as students sharing their knowledge and understanding, leading to the exchange of new ideas and meanings.

Outcomes The teachers were observed creating opportunities for students to take responsibility for learning by using activities designed for the interactive whiteboard. The researchers cited a lesson that had students in a science class taking turns at the interactive whiteboard, building and manipulating a food web. Another example described learners annotating a diagram about tiny air sacs in the lungs. The researchers found interactive whiteboards to be effective in supporting the teachers’ goals of challenging and developing student thinking as they supported a multimodal approach to teaching and learning. This approach was especially apparent in the teachers’ use of animations and display of rich sources of media using the interactive whiteboard.

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The researchers concluded that the use of the interactive whiteboard is especially helpful in engaging students in meaningful whole-class activities. They found that using interactive whiteboards supports shared cognition, articulation, collective evaluation and helping students construct new learning pathways leading to new knowledge – the basic tenets of intersubjectivity. The researchers found that using the interactive whiteboard in whole-class teaching achieved the following gains: • Focused student thinking on key scientific concepts and processes so they were able to gain knowledge and come to new and shared understandings • Supported step-by-step knowledge building when interspersed with small group discussion • Fostered active pupil learning through guided participation and collaboration • Supported teachers in the creation of ideal social and cognitive conditions for intersubjectivity • Facilitated the incorporation of a wider range of more exciting and interactive media-rich content than otherwise possible In the future, researchers expected the use of interactive whiteboards to lead to an increase in pair and groupwork among students, reaching an enhanced stage of interactive learning. Research S. Hennessy et al. “Pedagogical strategies for using the interactive whiteboard to foster learner participation in school science.” Learning, Media & Technology, vol. 32, no. 3, September 2007. ic

A significant upgrade

to the Senteo interactive response system gives teachers access to a comprehensive new gradebook, along with extensive improvements to the tracking, reporting and analysis functions. Software version 2.0 integrates seamlessly with SMART Notebook software, which enables collaborative learning, and allows for the easier addition of questions to lesson activities, an improvement teachers will welcome. Senteo assessment software version 2.0 increases one-to-one interaction in the classroom by enabling teachers to survey students and use these student responses to further personalize instruction. Enhanced tracking functions include a full-featured gradebook that keeps track of each student’s results on all in-class assignments. Teachers can sort, organize and monitor student grades and build comprehensive reports based on grades. The system comes with many powerful new features so student names can be tagged with keywords that indicate core attributes, such as gender and student background, and other characteristics. Version 2.0 also allows access to thousands of Senteo question sets, correlated to state standards, on SMART’s education solutions website. Assessment questions created by a third party can easily be integrated into SMART Notebook software. Senteo interactive response system customers will be able to upgrade to version 2.0 at no charge by visiting www.smarttech.com/ support/software. ic

NEWS

SMART sponsors Intel skoool SMART Technologies is now a global sponsor of www.skoool.com, the online education website from

Intel® Performance Learning Solutions and the Intel World Ahead Program. SMART has been involved with skoool™ technology since 2005. It has funded the development of high-quality interactive math and science materials for teachers and students in developing nations. SMART’s global sponsorship makes these resources available in more countries and provides further support for new skoool programs in other parts of the world. skoool websites are available in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Australia. Additional skoool programs have launched in the first half of 2008 in Latin America and Africa. Further developments in 2008 and 2009 will bring the online resource to more countries in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe. For more information, visit www.skoool.com. ic

L E A D E R S I N E D U C AT I O N

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Education reform through public-private partnerships

Online training now offered in five languages

When Haif Bannayan, the chief executive

officer of the Jordan Education Initiative (JEI), is asked why he is working to transform Jordan’s public education system, he answers quite simply, saying, “I have a strong belief in the importance of education reform. Decent education is a right for all.” A strong public education, he believes, is the best means of supporting oneself, no matter the circumstances. Due to his role as secretary general of the ICT ministry, he became a member of the executive board of JEI, which was launched in June 2003. An international pilot project, the JEI seeks great changes in public education with a particular emphasis on ICT. What sets the JEI apart from other education initiatives is that it is a publicprivate partnership involving the Jordanian government, the World Economic Forum, Jordanian companies, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and international corporations, including SMART Technologies. “The basis of such collaboration is sharing knowledge and expertise,” says Bannayan, calling the initiative a win-win situation for the government, and local and global partners.

But the real winners are the students in the 100 Jordanian public schools selected to be a part of this all-encompassing initiative. Because of the public-private partnership, the students in these Discovery Schools now benefit from a state-ofthe-art technology infrastructure. Features include a nationwide high-speed network, e-learning opportunities and in-class technology supported by SMART Board interactive whiteboards. ICT is a primary focus, because as Bannayan says, “What we observe in ICT-operated classrooms is that the middle and poor performers are very engaged in the classroom, and this is one good way of assuring quality education for all.” He adds, “One of the most engaging tools we have experimented with is the SMART Board interactive whiteboard…. That technology allows teachers and students to innovate and interact by sharing their learning.” Now, Bannayan explains, the JEI is working to increase the level of technology adoption in the Discovery schools, further introduce 21st-century learning skills and roll out their reforms to other Jordanian schools. They will also be sharing their success with other nations around the globe so that the initiative can be replicated and their accomplishments duplicated. ic

“One of the most engaging tools we have experimented with is the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.... That technology allows teachers and students to innovate and interact by sharing their learning.” – Haif Bannayan, chief executive officer, Jordan Education Initiative

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, Senteo, AirLiner, SynchronEyes, SMART Ideas, Bridgit, smarttech, the SMART logo and all SMART taglines are trademarks or registered trademarks of SMART Technologies ULC in the U.S. and/or other countries. skoool is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other third party product and company names are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Printed in Canada 08/2008. 10588-08.

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More people in

more countries now have access to free online training from SMART Technologies. Toll-free access is available in more than 70 countries with training offered in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English. Implementing the new languages across an extensive range of training sessions gives SMART the most comprehensive and accessible online training program in the interactive whiteboard product category. More than 15,000 English-speaking teachers and corporate users have received training on SMART products through the online program since it became available four years ago. SMART online training sessions are conducted via telephone and SMART’s own Bridgit™ conferencing software. The sessions are delivered by trainers who use SMART products every day and offer a quick 30- to 60-minute, no-cost overview of SMART products. Each week 45 sessions (approximately 180 each month) are offered on a dozen topics. Descriptions, a calendar outlining upcoming training sessions and connection instructions can be accessed at http://smarttech.com/ trainingcenter/online/index.asp. ic

Global Education Technology Summits 2008 – sharing experience In May, SMART hosted

regional Global Education Technology Summits (GETS) in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, Asia and Latin America. These events built on the success of previous GETS events held in Calgary and Europe. Supported by Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, the GETS 2008 events brought together senior leaders in education, government and business to share their experiences implementing ICT for student success. Each twoday summit included a series of sessions focused on key regional topics related to ICT in education, including ICT policy, teacher training, research and digital content strategies. The events were attended by more than 235 education officials from 48 countries, demonstrating the increasing interest worldwide in the use of ICT and SMART products in education. Stay tuned for more details on upcoming GETS events. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to contact us at GETS@ smarttech.com. ic