St. Nicholas’ International College Introduces Smart Boards
As the brainchild of the current principal Rev. Fr. B. Anselm shrian, St. Nicholas’ International College, Negombo has become one of the handful schools in the country to introduce Smart Boards to the classrooms in its day-to-day teaching and learning. The Smart Board System (SBS) is an important step the school has taken towards a better teaching-learning experience for all involved. The main purpose of the SBS is to get our students to learn better, enjoy learning, understand the lessons better and eventually to produce improved results at assessments, be it at term tests or at OL and AL exams. This should also help the weaker students to be more interested in and understanding towards lessons. The SBS consists of a Smart Board, a computer and a projector.
The smart board system was introduced initially to the AS and AL sections and was run as a pilot project to identify its usability and practical issues. After a thorough evaluation, the smart boards were introduced to other classrooms as well. As a first reaction, we see a marked improvement in the students’ learning experience when learning is done through the digital medium. This is a major step towards providing the students with more facilities making a leap into the future in teaching and learning. As always, St. Nicholas’ International College seeks to provide the best facilities possible to its students. Our dream is to extend this facility to all classrooms.
Benefits of the Smart Board System
Here is some of the feedback from the teachers:
“This facility provides huge interaction from students. It’s very important for some areas of mathematics which involve many data, graphs in XY plane”.
“This has become an ‘absolute’ necessity to meet the limited number of periods that is available for a subject. Also it has become a good tool to get the students ‘focused’ on the subject during the lessons, especially the students learn ‘with extra interaction’ now because of the smart board. The teaching moves faster too”.
“If we prepare for the lesson well, the lesson can be conducted efficiently and seems like children are interested. It’s very much appreciated”.
“As a language teacher, this has made an unprecedented impact on students. This is a student friendly mechanism that boosts the morale of all the students and slow learners. I really appreciate the great venture probably the 1st in the island”.
In a regular classroom the teacher writes on the board and the students note it down in their notebooks. This is a very dull approach in the teaching process. But in the SBS there is a digital approach for notes. The teacher, instead of writing on the board, is able to teach using PowerPoint Presentations, Word Documents, PDFs, images, videos, graphs, digital maps, etc.
There are many topics in the curriculum which are very difficult to understand. They cannot be just taught by using a marker pen and whiteboard. They require and interactive teaching approach. With the SBS the teacher can use multimedia to teach that topic to the students. The students learn more from what they see rather than from what they listen.
In a regular classroom, the students are sometimes distracted and bored. Some students speak with each other rather than listen to the teacher. But it is not so in a smart classroom. The use of smart technology in the class makes the classroom a fun room. The class becomes interesting and enjoyable for the students. No student will feel sleepy. It makes learning a fun process. The students who do not like to go to school also will start enjoying the school.
It is often seen that students studying in a smart classroom get better results than those who study in a regular classroom. This is so because the understanding ability in the students studying in a smart classroom is way more than other students. The use of technology in the classroom for teaching increases the understanding of the students. The topic becomes clearer and the base of the subject becomes stronger. Studies reveal that there is an improvement in the results of students as high as 25% when using the interactive classroom method.
