Budget Woes May Deter SMART Move in Schools

NORTH CANAAN — Imagine a flat-screen computer monitor 4 feet high by 6 feet wide. It displays Web pages and school lessons from software, but goes even further. In math class, for example, students come up to the board and use the board’s touch-screen capability to move answer boxes. A virtual ruler measures the sides of a triangle. Special markers with "digital ink" and erasers allow it to be used as a white board.

And the work can be saved to a computer file to be printed and called up again later.

Jaws dropped as school board members and others met the SMART Board at the Jan. 11 meeting of the North Canaan Elementary School (NCES) Board of Education.

The new technology was demonstrated by fifth-grade teacher Claire Walton and computer teacher Patricia Palmer. Learning the New Technology

The board, computer, projector and sound system are designed to be portable. The system, developed by SMART Technologies, can be adapted for use with any software that has touch-screen capability.

Walton is using it in her classroom for a month before it is sent on to another classroom. Meanwhile, teachers are attending after-school workshops to train to use the SMART Board. As they become proficient, their classrooms will go on the rotation.

It was no surprise to hear the students love the "electronic chalkboard."

"It’s new and exciting and they all want to be involved," Walton said.

"They are motivated to stay on task. While one student is working at the board, the rest are engaged, waiting for their turn."

Some of its other features are video with sound bites; a screen shade that can be moved by touch to reveal answers; a clip-art catalogue of 5,000 images geared for educators to help keep things interesting; and the capability to use interactive Web pages and pull up pages from teachers’ Web sites.

Walton said there is not one map or textbook in the school with an accurate, up-to-date world map. The SMART Board can be used to find on-line maps with the latest data from a changing world.

"One advantage that was unexpected was that it has helped the students develop public speaking skills," Walton said. "Because it uses a projector, they can’t stand directly in front of the board. They have to stand off to the side, like they would during a presentation."

It was a surprise to hear the entire setup costs $4,500. School board members remarked it seemed a very reasonable price.Getting SMART

SMART Technologies introduced the interactive white board in 1991, but it is a new concept to most people. It would seem more schools would have latched onto it by now. But 15 years ago, schools were just introducing computers.

Since then, it’s been a balancing act for most, between budgetary constraints and the cost of adding hardware and keeping up with technology. The learning curve of new capabilities and the Internet has also been steep.

Ultimately, North Canaan would like to have a SMART Board in every classroom.

But the demonstration of the technology was followed by bad news on the NCES computer front: One third of its PC computers will be obsolete by the end of the school year.

And that doesn’t just mean out-of-date or slow. The 49 machines are between 7 and 10 years old and cannot run or be upgraded to run anything beyond the Windows 98 operating system.

"Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 98 a year ago. Our computer service has advised us that, as of July 1, they will no longer support it either," Principal Rosemary Keilty told the board. "That means if anything goes wrong with those computers, we are on our own to try to fix them."

Palmer said she and the school’s technology specialist have tried to upgrade the PCs and install new operating systems, without success.

"The technician and I researched buying new parts, but it is not worth the cost of the equipment and his time," Palmer said. "The machines are all so old, they just have to go. They will only hinder upgrades to the entire system and our progress in networking."

Computers will certainly be a part of fiscal 2008 budget discussions, which have already begun.

The board may look at an approach that doesn’t require a saturation of PCs. Just a day before the board meeting, SMART Technologies launched Senteo, an interactive response system that gives teachers and students their own hand-held devices. Teachers can send information to the entire class, receive information from each student, or communicate one-on-one with students.