Smart Boards, Tables Making The Grade at Leggee

In discussing the interactive whiteboard she uses in her fifth grade classroom at , Jackie Grell’s opinion of the technology rests in her enthusiasm as much as it does her words.

“If students compose the writings — that is, if they go up to the board, take the pens and actually do the writing — I can save it, I can share it with parents, I can print it in a newsletter, I can print it out for the students, they can take it home, all that fun stuff,” Grell said.

With the installation of two more boards last summer, Leggee now has ten interactive whiteboards, called Smart Boards, in its classrooms and three Smart Tables in its special needs classrooms.

Like iPods and iPads, Smart Boards and Tables employ user-detection actions such as dropping and dragging or tapping to select. During one recent exercise, students were asked to approach the whiteboard and identify various nouns, verbs and participles by circling them with a whiteboard-compatible pen.

Still, as effective as the technology is, students’ shadows are sometimes cast on the board by an overhead projector, which is why Leggee’s newest Smart Boards rely less on the projector and are looked upon as all-in-one units. Either way the whiteboards have been a hit with students, of course, as well as teachers.

“The teachers who have used it really enjoy it,” Leggee Principal Scott Iddings said. “Whether it be the LCD or the Smart Boards, the comment that I keep hearing from teachers is, ‘I don’t know how I would’ve taught before’ because they’ve incorporated it into their classrooms. It’s just not a teaching tool. It’s part of the classroom.”

As examples, Iddings cites the use of certain software programs.

“(Teachers) put together their own lunch programs where students will walk up to the board, take their name, and drag it into ‘hot lunch’ or ‘salad’ or ‘cold lunch’ and that’s how teachers count up their lunches and send it off (to the cafeteria),” he said. “It’s also how they conduct attendance. It really speeds up the start of the day.”

Perhaps the greatest benefit to the technology is the ability of teachers to more easily chart and measure a student’s performance.

“The information that we get from technology now is incredible,” Iddings said, “It helps up direct our instruction. We can really pinpoint things and say this child is struggling in phonemic awareness, and here’s what we can do to in working with that child specifically.”

Still, Iddings says it’s too early to draw conclusions from the data.

“I don’t think we’ve had this new technology in place long enough to really say, gosh it’s had a positive impact,” he said. “I’m hoping to have that information, and just some sort of support to show it is improving student growth. And that’s what we really want. We want to see that all the students are growing, whichever level they are.”

Growing, too, Iddings hopes, is the number of Leggee classrooms that have Smart Boards.

“I want them in every classroom in which it’ll be used,” he said. “I’m not going to buy something for a teacher if they don’t feel comfortable using it. I’m putting it out there for teachers who show a willingness to use that kind of technology in the classroom and really dive into it. Of course my goal is for every staff member to feel comfortable, and I think as staff members see other staff members using the technology they’ll become curious and eventually comfortable.”

For the goal to become a reality Iddings says he’ll rely on the continued support of Leggee’s PTA. The 180-member group maintains a technology fund and, through various fundraisers, helped pay for the Smart Boards, which range in price from $1,500 to $2,000 each.

“In researching what was out there and seeing where the educational needs needed to go, this is clearly where education is going,” said PTA President Jen Besch of the Smart Boards. “The education realm is becoming one that is technology based and our school was really behind in getting that technology.”

Besch said upcoming PTA fundraisers include an outing to see the Chicago Express hockey team, a family movie night, and family dine-out nights that are held each month.

Additional funding for the Smart Boards and Tables was acquired through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.