Davidson+School

Davidson School’s technology goal this year focused on SMARTboard use. We now have a SMARTboard in every classroom and wanted to focus on increasing teacher comfort level and daily use of the tool. Our teachers range from experienced teachers who use the tool every day to others who are just beginning to experiment.

Our first order of business was to have Brian Agren from Sharp’s Audio Visual come out and give our staff a free SMART workshop. He was able to provide a session that was suited to the varied levels of our staff and everyone walked away having learned something new.

The second part of the plan was to allow teachers to explore and ask questions. During this phase we made staff aware that our learning coach was available to help them develop in this area. We had some teachers who took advantage of this resource and others who chose to continue to learn on their own.

Every SMARTboard in our school is used every day now. This use ranges from morning messages in grade 1 to full use in almost every high school class. While year one was successful in improving teacher comfort level, we still have some work to do. Year two will see us make better use of our learning coach in this area as well as utilizing our “expert” staff members to lead smaller sessions during in house PD days.

A secondary goal that evolved this year was in the area of mobile devices. Many of our classrooms started to experiment with these devices for educational purposes. This ranged from research to polls to audio and video recording. Our school also purchased an Apple TV that we have been using to support the use of these mobile devices for presentation and sharing purposes. This is an area we will continue to explore next year.