As educators wrestle with shifting standards and the challenge of engaging today’s students, Indian Creek School, a private Pre-K-12 institution based in Crownsville, Maryland, is innovating its own “classroom of the future” with a shift toward project-based learning and a strengthened focus on using the latest classroom technologies to enhance lessons for both teachers and students.
The Tech Challenge
One of the most impactful changes to date is the addition of a dozen new interactive display boards that greatly enhance teacher flexibility and lesson planning. While the school had implemented classroom displays years earlier, most teachers found them to be over-complicated and relented to using only basic functions. After reviewing several brands of classroom displays recommended by colleagues at other schools, none met the technology staff’s expectations. As chance would have it, the school’s Director of Educational Technology found the answer in an advertisement for a product she hadn’t seen before: LG CreateBoard, a powerful and easy-to-use multi-touch interactive display board from LG Business Solutions.
The LG CreateBoard Solution
With LG CreateBoards, teachers can easily augment lessons with presentations or videos, screen share lessons or content from their own devices, allow multiple students to write on the board simultaneously and enable students to screen share projects from their own devices. The new boards were implemented for the 2022-23 school year, replacing aging smart board solutions that no longer lived up to the school’s expectations.
“With our previous classroom smart boards having so many features and being so complicated, it felt as if the teachers were given a chef’s kitchen when they only wanted to make mac-n-cheese,” says Sara White, Indian Creek School’s director of educational technology. “Teachers weren’t cooking up sophisticated lessons because the technology required overly complicated setup, so the boards simply weren’t serving the purpose we intended. We were paying for features and software that were never used. After our staff performed hands-on evaluations of many of the most popular interactive display board products available today, we determined that the LG CreateBoard checked all our boxes, from build quality, reliability and intuitive operations to pricing and mobile use capabilities.”
The Installation
Having located a solution that’s simple to use and presents more opportunity for student engagement, the school purchased the interactive digital boards to be used on mobile carts: ten 75-inch models that rotate between classrooms, another 75-inch model that provides messaging in the cafeteria, and a massive 86-inch model that stays in the library for various uses. The school’s choice to implement LG CreateBoards also significantly reduced the required budget and enabled the purchase of a 3D printer and a professional laser cutter for a new Innovation Lab, giving students even greater access to the latest learning and creativity tools.
“Today’s students and parents who have spent their whole lives using mobile and interactive devices are increasingly weighing a school’s technology integration when choosing where to attend,” says Victoria Sanville, LG’s national sales manager for the public sector vertical. “As alternative educational funding structures spread to more districts, these prospective students may consider a potential school’s hybrid learning options, media or digital production facilities, collaborative tools and other high-tech capabilities. LG CreateBoards can form a major component of a school’s technological offerings and prove to newcomers that all students are given enhanced and individualized learning opportunities.”
LG CreateBoard Use Cases in the Classroom
Whether a language teacher shows instructional content to demonstrate mouth movements and pronunciation, or a coach plays video from yesterday’s game to improve teamwork, there are applications for virtually every discipline. Indian Creek School is also using the CreateBoard with a low-height stand to help 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds with handwriting and reading.
From sixth grade up, students at Indian Creek School are welcome to use their own personal devices for certain classroom activities, while school facilities provide access to software tools such as the Adobe Creative Cloud and 3D modeling software. Classroom activities have already included making advertising pitches, coding video games and creating a graphical thumbnail in Adobe Photoshop. These projects can then be shared wirelessly to the CreateBoards to enable student presentations.
“The LG CreateBoard provides a valuable set of presentation and collaborative tools that enhance student engagement and provide teachers much greater flexibility in arranging and managing their classrooms,” White adds. “Even seemingly simple functions, such as reliable and easy to use screen sharing, can transform a classroom, allowing teachers to move around as they show a presentation or to help individual students without losing control of video content. Our goal is to provide every student with the best possible education, and that requires giving our teachers effective technology tools like the LG CreateBoard that can be used every day without complication.”
Staff also cited unrivaled service from LG Business Solutions, noting that they had never before been provided a technician’s cell phone number to assist with early troubleshooting and setup. The school’s future plans include upgrading the library CreateBoard to an upcoming 98-inch-model and to consider additional digital signage opportunities to share school messaging.
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