Teachers in the Manchester Township School District are taking advantage of new interactive technology to deliver engaging lessons and get instant feedback from their students. Middle school Language Arts teacher Nikki Mazur and Technology teacher Peg Viola demonstrated some of the new technology at the November Board of Education meeting.
Standing in front of what looked like a normal whiteboard, or dry erase marker board, Viola explained that it was actually a touch sensitive screen, on which students and teachers may interact with a variety of computer programs. The technology is called an interactive whiteboard or brand name Promethean ActivBoard. Instead of looking at a computer program on a monitor, the image is projected onto the screen, and a special pen is used to write, draw, click on or select areas of the screen.
In addition, handheld devices called ‘clickers’ or ‘voters’ may be used by students to respond to questions, giving teachers immediate feedback. “If half the students get a question wrong, we know we need to try another strategy to get the information across,” said Viola. “If they all get it right, we know we can move on.”
Mazur said that hundreds of lessons in the form of ‘flipchart’ presentations are available to teachers through an online service that is included with the boards, or teachers may create their own flipcharts. Through a web program called Study Island, which the middle school has used for several years to enforce skills needed for state testing, teachers may create lessons, games and tests designed to meet the specific needs of the school’s students, using data from a state-sponsored online service called Learnia. Learnia provides ongoing benchmark testing for students and data analysis for teachers, aligned with the NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards.
Viola and Mazur said that teachers were anxious at first about using the whiteboards, but about 30 teachers are now involved in study groups that meet regularly to learn about the technology, discuss ways to use it in the classroom, and provide support for one another. There are three study groups divided by subject area – Math, Language Arts, and Science/Social Studies. “Now these teachers are very excited about using the boards,” said Viola.
The middle school has three of the interactive whiteboards and a set of 32 clickers. The high school has three boards, and each elementary school has two boards.
“This is great technology but it also very expensive so we are hoping to be able to add a few more each year until we get them throughout the buildings,” said Superintendent of Schools, David Trethaway. He thanked the Manchester PTA and the Manchester Twp. Educational Foundation for providing some of the first boards and projectors.
“Some people might say, why do you need all of this, you should just get back to basics,” remarked Trethaway. “The reality is that for this generation of students, this new technology is the basics for the world they will work in.”
