Municipal schools get smart boards

Friday, 17 October 2014 06:36 administrator
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The Hindu            17.10.2014   

Municipal schools get smart boards

Devices have many resources that can serve as teaching tools

Krishnagiri Municipality has provided Municipal schools with liquid crystal display (LCD) touch screen smart boards as teaching tools.

To upgrade academic teaching tools, nine schools – including two Urdu schools and seven higher secondary and middle schools – have been provided with smart boards to enhance the classroom learning experience.

When connected to a laptop, the interactive white board, ‘Smart’, becomes a touch-sensitive surface, much like the screen of a smart phone.

Using inbuilt software ‘Active Inspire’, the device enables the teacher to highlight, erase and draw, among other actions, says R.Aravind, Proprietor of Future Era, the Coimbatore-based company that has supplied the Canadian-brand.

‘Smart board’ has a combination of over five lakh inbuilt resources that come as handy teaching tools. The teacher can select and drag a dissected heart, explain the functioning of the left artery or select a map or a historic place, as the case may be, to make the students understand, says Mr.Aravind.

“We have provided similar boards to Corporation schools in Salem. But they require electromagnetic pens. But, Krishnagiri is the first Municipality to have a touch board, making it user-friendly,” says Mr.Aravind.

In schools that have Internet facility, there can be live downloads to aid learning. The total package costs about Rs.1.5 lakh, inclusive of board, projector and installation material.

Sources said that the real challenge is in imparting training to teachers. Future Era has proposed two levels of training – a basic one and an intermediate level one – to explore more tools in the software. The software can recognise handwriting and convert it into text. Any language, including Tamil or Urdu can be used as the teaching medium.

K.C. Thangamuthu, Muncipality chairperson, told The Hindu , “This was the former Chief Minister’s vision, and we have implemented it. We will now train teachers to use the tool.”