What is a smart board used for? North Carolina-based fourth-grade teacher Riley Higgins is using a smart board in the classroom to build 21st-century learners. The language arts and social studies teacher recently asked her students, ages 9 and 10, to research a city in their state and create a multimedia project they then shared on their smart boards. The project makes kids excited to learn, and using an interactive whiteboard, she said, makes learning “fun.” These types of interactive projects recently helped her win the Teacher of the Week award from a local television station.
This is just an example of the many advantages of interactive whiteboards over normal blackboards or whiteboards. The technology, which is becoming more widely adopted in schools across the country, has also been proven to help students stay engaged with their schoolwork.
Today, tools that help teachers capture and keep students’ attention are invaluable. A 2022 study by Gallup found that digital tools are strongly associated with better student outcomes including ease of learning from home and expectations for learning progress. A Harvard Business Review article asserts that lack of student engagement is one of the biggest issues educators face today. Another study shows that student engagement — specifically low student engagement — is the issue most in the way of students reaching grade level, as 68% of teachers agreed.
Smart boards — also called interactive whiteboards or e-boards — improve the learning experience while making teachers’ lives better. They allow teachers and students to learn collaboratively, share files, access online resources and use educational software.
Here are five of the top uses of smart boards in teaching and learning, and how they can benefit every student.
Today’s K-12 students are digital natives, and researchers say they learn better because of it.
One study found that smart boards improve good teaching and increase clarity among teachers and students. With smart boards, like Samsung Interactive Displays, teachers can create more dynamic lessons by writing or typing on screen, calling attention to certain topics with highlights, circles, arrows or zooming in, and sharing multimedia content such as videos, webpages, presentations and images. The smart board can even be divided into multiple sections so more than one student can work on it at once. In fact, using Split Screen Mode, teachers and students can see two windows at once.
Whether a child is a visual learner, an auditory learner or a kinesthetic (hands-on) learner, an interactive whiteboard can benefit them. Visual learners can view the 4K UHD screen — such as the one on Samsung Interactive Displays — while auditory learners can listen to multimedia content, and hands-on learners can write on the board with a stylus, or even their finger. Educators can use the smart board for teaching small groups, organized by learning style, or one on one with individual students. Plus, since Samsung Interactive Displays support powerful screen sharing, teachers and students can participate using smart wireless sharing from multiple devices.
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When students are out sick, K-12 teachers typically spend time creating work packets for them to catch up. With a smart board, this process is easier since teachers can screenshot their lessons and instantly save and share them with students and colleagues as needed. Or, they can record the entire lesson with the recording feature. The content options are limitless: Teachers can save their notes so they can pick up where they left off, or they can create review materials for students to bring home to study. This is especially beneficial for students who are trailing their peers, as they no longer have to take notes in real time while struggling to keep pace with the lesson. If they miss something, they can easily refer back to it on their own time.
At the beginning of the day, smart board startup is easy — just turn it on, and go. And at the end of the day, teachers can turn off the board without needing to erase anything or take physical notes on what they covered.
Sometimes, there’s a need for remote learning. Smart boards make it easier for teachers to include remote students via videoconference technology. There’s no need to set up any special cameras. Students at home can see everything the teacher is doing and interact with their peers, too. This not only enables hybrid learning but encourages it. You can also benefit by using intelligent apps for class, such as Boxlight’s MimioConnect educational software specifically designed to help students meet their educational goals.
A study in the Universal Journal of Educational Research proved that students who learned via an interactive whiteboard did significantly better on standardized tests than those who did not use the technology. The same study points out that permanence in learning is increased through visual materials, paintings, symbols and screen designs. Another study linked achievement on the Ohio Achievement Reading Tests to the use of interactive whiteboards, across all grade levels. And since the newest Samsung Interactive Displays feature Android 11 OS, it’s easier and more comfortable for teachers to unlock unlimited learning potential via a familiar user experience.
Given all the ways interactive smart boards enhance the learning experience, school districts that invest in smart boards are investing in their students.
You can find the right classroom display for your students’ needs — and for your budget — by exploring Samsung’s full lineup of versatile interactive displays. And discover how simple, scalable and secure display solutions can empower educators to take control of the curriculum in this free guide.
There is some combination of utility, usability, learning curve, and right-time/right-place that has to come together when we introduce new technology. The reality of my friend’s smart board situation is a problem we tackle every day at Myplanet: How do we think about and account for all the ways a new, tech-based solution will impact its users?
For any given project, there are countless potential solutions. And before creating the solution — before deciding on what that solution is, even — it’s important to assess not only the actual needs of your users, but also the ways a potential solution will impact them.
When we start working on a new project, the first question we ask is what problem needs to be solved? That’s what good design and development teams do. It might sound obvious or even redundant if you’re unfamiliar with design thinking principles, but it’s an essential step in the process. The reality is folks are quick to jump to a solution, often before establishing what the actual issue is.
But when we skip that first step, all we end up doing is putting a bandaid on a broken leg. You can fix a lot of symptoms without ever solving a problem if you don’t take that step back and dig deeply into what’s causing the issue(s) in the first place. It can be especially tricky to overcome this tendency when there’s a specific technology people want to employ (because it’s new and exciting and they want to be leading-edge). But only once we’ve established what the problem is can we begin looking at possible solutions.
For people who are genuinely motivated to improve everyday experiences, the questions that open up at this stage are some of the most important for the whole project: What are the restrictions around possible solutions? Who will be impacted, both directly and indirectly, by changing the current system or introducing a new one? In what ways? How can we mitigate the upheaval? And how can we make adopting the solution as seamless and easy as possible?
It’s when we ask these questions that we start to think critically about what we’re developing and designing. Take the smart board example: it’s about more than just knowing teachers and students will both interact with it. How will students interact with it? What about students with special needs, how will they be impacted by changing the teaching methods? What environmental challenges might be an issue, such as how interacting with the smart board will be impacted when teachers want to rearrange desks for group work? And how can teachers solve — or at least work around — technical problems when they occur? A few tweaks to how the smart board was introduced to the classroom and it’s mandated uses could make all the difference for my friend.
We can’t account for every edge case, but thinking things through and actually connecting with users where they are — before, during, and if we’re lucky, after — the development of the product, can help us anticipate some of the most common potential issues and resolve them before they become permanent barriers to success.
We work with large companies, designing and building software solutions for some of their toughest workplace problems. The work we do gets rolled out to tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. It can look nicer, or go faster, or meet some other metric that sounds good, but if it doesn’t meaningfully improve how the work gets done, then in the end we missed the mark. And if we roll something out that makes it actively harder to get work done? That’s a worst-nightmare-of-all-time scenario, as far as we’re concerned.
Being user-centred requires us to be interested in uncovering the truths beneath the surface. It takes a bit more time, but in the end we create solutions for people that actually solve their problems, not just provide them with a new set of headaches. Maybe the smart board is the right solution for my friend, but the way it was implemented sure wasn’t and that’s an important part of the equation.
Last week we wrote about a “Smart Things Canvas” we created to help ourselves think through some of the new technology being implemented in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space, breaking down the big idea of AI into smaller, actual-use components on individual projects. It’s one way among many we help ourselves think holistically about the solutions we create.
But it’s not just the sexy new technologies we need to be careful with; any technology change can have a big impact when it requires a shift in behaviour or understanding. Smart boards are brilliant advances in interactive technology that have seen huge success in business contexts all over the world, but put them to use where they aren’t the right solution and they quickly become a dumb idea.
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