Our New SMART Technology

In the summer of 2008, St. Michael’s made an extraordinary commitment to educational innovation when it purchased a broad suite of interactive hardware to enhance classroom instruction. The acquisition from CCS Presentation Systems included more than a dozen “SMART Boards,” as well as digital projectors, document cameras, and student-response units.

Digital projectors allow teachers to display, in a highly visible way, content from their own laptops or desktop workstations. Teachers and students both can prepare creative, impactful lessons, such as vivid PowerPoints that survey Surrealistic painting, WebQuests that explore ancient Rome, or video clips of classic films that bring novel studies to life.

Document cameras can project student essays, pages from novels, artwork, and even three-dimensional objects onto the same large screen. They can also capture still images of whatever is projected, so that students, for example, may measure the angles of intersecting lines on a teacher’s palm!

Student-response units enable teachers to gain quantifiable feedback from students’ responses to a given question and then gauge instantly whether a concept has been sufficiently mastered.

Finally, perhaps the most thrilling component of our new educational technology is the SMART Board. This touch-sensitive, interactive whiteboard allows students to physically manipulate text and images right on the projection screen. Children can revise passages of a composition or solve equations in digital “ink,” which can be saved on file for future discussions.  The school plans to build further on this initial investment, as multimedia technology becomes an even more routine and vital component of everyday teaching at St. Michael’s.