Bishop England Introduces SMART Board Technology

By Contributing Bishop England High School Student Matthew Kuhn, ’09

At the start of the 2008-2009 school year, students and teachers at Daniel Island’s Bishop England High School encountered a new technological innovation present in their classrooms: Interactive “SMARTboards.” No longer hampered by the limitations of traditional chalk and marker boards, eleven teachers received the interactive teaching boards, which have a wide range of uses. Teachers can digitally display typed notes for their students with full-sized images. The SMARTboards also allow teachers and students to write onscreen with special digital pens, or even just their fingers.

The SMARTboards enable teachers to show movies and online videos to their students on large screens, eliminating the need for in-class televisions and bulky mobile VCR/DVD units. Teachers simply connect the SMARTboard to their computer and control it with a mouse and keyboard, or by using hand gestures on the board’s interactive touch screen. Bishop England senior Joshua DeLaporte finds the school’s new technology enriching. “It makes learning a lot more fun and it lets you to focus on the material that’s being covered,” he says. Bishop England is planning on expanding the number of classrooms with interactive SMARTboards over the next several years.