The Hindu            17.10.2014   

Municipal schools get smart boards

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.”