Affton Schools Fill All Classrooms With Smart Boards

Gone are the days when students ritually beat the dust out of chalkboard erasers.

This summer, the completed the final thrust of its plan to give teachers high tech tools to engage students, putting Smart Boards in nearly every classroom.

Smart Boards have been steadily moving into Affton schools since the district wrote its current technology plan in 2004. This summer, the district installed around two dozen new boards across its four buildings, which left only five or six classrooms unwired. These are classrooms of teachers who have opted out of using the new technology for now, but even these last few will get boards next summer, Affton Technology Coordinator Ron Spicer said.

There are now more than 100 of the teaching devices in the district. Spicer said the district has completed the Smart Board objective of its tech plan a year early.

Smart Boards use projection and touch detection to give teachers a deeply interactive whiteboard on which to display lesson materials or Web pages. With special pens users can click, drag or draw.

“It allows the teacher to really bring the subject matter alive,” Spicer said.

Each student in the classroom also has a remote with their at their seat, with which they can respond to yes/no or multiple choice questions. Teachers can use these remotes to quiz students or to gauge student reaction to class material. Students can also come up to the board and take the lead on learning and teaching.

“The district’s philosophy has been that the technology shouldn’t be the centerpiece of the learning environment, it should just be one more tool,” Spicer said. “It makes it a much more interactive environment. It’s not just a board.”

When the district first began purchasing Smart Boards, the cost was around $4,200 per classroom. Each year, however, the boards have gotten cheaper. This year, the district paid $3,800 per classroom.

Spicer said this means that each board costs between $100 and $200 per student. “The textbook costs more than that,” he said.

Spicer added that while the boards themselves have not changed much in the past few years, improvements in software continuously add new functionality.