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Jennifer Larson
Community Editor
Blackboards are getting to be all but obsolete in classrooms as state-of-the-art technology is increasingly being implemented in Forest Lake area schools. Students and teachers alike have been familiarizing themselves with SMART Boards over this past year. Mounted on a wall, interactive SMART Boards are really electronic whiteboards that utilize a data projector to display the output of a computer. It is touch sensitive so a user can write with a finger or “ink-less pen,” enabling manipulation in much of the same way as a computer touchscreen feature.
According to Instructional Technology & Curriculum Coordinator Jill Somrock, there are a total of 57 district-wide.
She said the boards were purchased with funds totaling around $140,000 from many sources such as PTO/PTA organizations, donations from people, parents and businesses like Target as well as fund-raising by students through sales, recycling and book fair to Box Tops for Education and district audio visual funds, grants and awards.
ISD 831 Board of Education Member Rob Rapheal said the district is very appreciative to those organizations for their donations.
“The PTO’s have been great at helping us achieve our goals,” he said.
Besides being a father and board member, it pleases him on a professional level that SMART Boards are being implemented in Forest Lake area schools. Rapheal, from Scandia, is a software engineer.
“I’m personally happy to see them integrated in the classroom,” he said. “(SMART Boards) are nice because they are a supplement – adding to what we already have.”
Rapheal said the boards, which cost around $3,800 with accessories and installation, holds the attention of students. He noted that it is hard to find technology that really helps the classroom, and thinks that ISD 831 wasn’t able to do that effectively in the past.
However, Somrock said that not all schools are equipped with the new technology as it depends on their access to those funds previously mentioned.
Lino Lakes Elementary leads the district in the number of boards with 16. Somrock said that Diane Giorgi, school technology specialist, has been the true driving force for SMART implementations in ISD 831.
Other schools besides Lino Lakes with the boards are Forest View Elementary (9), Forest Lake Elementary (7), Wyoming (6), Linwood (3), Century Junior High (1) and four each at Columbus, Scandia and Forest Lake High. Special education also has three SMART Boards.
The Beginning
During the 2006-2007 school year, Giorgi said the teachers at Lino Lakes formed a committee to take a closer look at SMART Boards and their uses in the classroom. At that time, she noted there was just one board in the Forest Lake Area School District at Scandia Elementary.
Giorgi and some of her colleagues made site visits to the Mahtomedi and Centennial school districts, which she said were the key that led to the full-blown SMART Board initiative Lino Lakes has undertaken. The energy and excitement generated by those site visits to other schools prompted their committee to host a SMART Board Open House at Lino Lakes to introduce the technology to parents and community members, said Giorgi.
She said that the Parent Teacher Organization quickly got on board, dedicating the bulk of their future fund-raising and even adding a couple additional events to accomplish the goal of installing a SMART Board in every instructional classroom as well in specialist areas by the end of the 2008-2009 school year.
Currently, Giorgi said that Lino Lakes has SMART Boards installed in the media center, which was the first to be integrated into the school in March 2007, and in all 15 classrooms grades one through six. She added that teachers have voluntarily participated in hundreds of hours of SMART Board training and integration sessions offered at various venues around the metro area as well as in-district.
Giorgi said there was some hesitation from teachers who were not tech savvy but now love their SMART Boards.
As a paraprofessional at Centerville Elementary, Cheri Cyzewski had an opportunity to see SMART Boards being used in another school district. Her son, Joey, is fortunate to be a third grader at Lino Lakes where nearly every classroom is equipped with the new technology.
She said it is very beneficial for students to have so much information at their finger tips. SMART Boards are also one educational tool that helps all types of learners, Cyzewski said.
“I was so impressed with them, it was dinner conversation,” she said.
Positive Impact
Giorgi said that implementation of the SMART Boards have significantly increased teacher collaboration as they work together to develop meaningful lessons to support their curriculum. The teachers also meet formally on a monthly basis for mini-sessions and to share tips and tricks that they’ve learned as they become more experienced SMART Board users.
Janine Allen, Columbus Elementary School Tech Specialists/Gifted Resource Teacher, said presenting new information, gathering information, offering collaborative classroom learning projects, introducing diverse software applications and reinforcing curricular objectives are some of the ways interactive SMART Boards have proven to be a successful, engaging instructional tool.
Giorgi said the board allows teachers to incorporate audio, video, animation and interactive activities into classroom instruction, providing student support for a wide-variety of learning styles. The SMART Board also allows them to harness the wealth of resources available on the Internet and incorporate them into their daily lessons, she said.
“From our experiences so far at Lino,” Giorgi said, “I truly believe that the SMART Board is the one piece of technology with the potential to have the greatest positive impact in education of any technology that has come along in the past several years.”
Youngest Users
Allen said the boards are being integrated in the instruction of most every subject. Each morning, Allen said the third grade students check in on an interactive Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet projected on the SMART Board. Every time a student chooses a lunch menu or milk break beverage, the results show on a pie chart and on a bar graph.
She said the SMART Board provides enhanced visibility and is a wonderful projection and presentation tool since the SMART Board measurers 77 inches diagonally. Interactive online in curricular areas are often used for demonstration purposes, where Allen said students can follow-up on those same Web sites either in one of Columbus’ two computer labs or on portable laptops.
Students have really taken to the technology, said Giorgi. The youngest users are quickly navigating through SMART Boards many capabilities.
“I don’t think they could understand a world that technology isn’t a part of,” she said.
Alli Hilger, a 6th Grader at Lino Lakes, sums up the students’ perspective.
“It’s better than a whiteboard,” she said.
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