Classroom Technology Helps Leadership Academy Network Accelerate Student Achievement—Here’s How
To prepare students for the future, educators must foster creativity, effective communications, problem-solving skills, and collaboration. When the Leadership Academy Network (LAN) in Fort Worth, TX, decided to update its old smart boards, selecting ones that aligned with its mission and fully prepared students became paramount. BenQ Boards proved to be an ideal fit.
A pioneering partnership between Fort Worth Independent School District and Texas Wesleyan University, LAN aims to enhance learning outcomes at the district's six PK-8 Leadership Academies. Its mission revolves around accelerating student achievement through service and an unwavering commitment to excellence, including its approach to technology upgrades.
The factors that went into the school’s decision were simple but critical. “Number one, is it good for students? And two, is it good for teachers?” explained Alex Seltzer, executive director of operations, LAN. “My job is to make sure that teachers and students have exactly what they need. It was a yes to both questions when we evaluated the BenQ Boards.”
BenQ Boards’ active learning features position schools at the forefront of technology. Many of its features are the result of partnerships with schools and continuous feedback from educators, including the EZ Write whiteboard and annotation tools that allow students to work hands-on with concepts. Educators and students can draw, take screen grabs, and easily incorporate them into the lesson with additional annotations and graphics to further comprehension.
Also, the smart board can record, save, and share lessons easily. Teachers simply tap the record button on the onscreen menu to create tutorials on the fly. These can be saved to the network, cloud (such as Google Classroom), or any connected storage for students to refer back to later. To drive collaboration opportunities, multiple students can work at the smart board simultaneously.
The BenQ Boards are also providing educators at LAN with what they need do their jobs better. For example, they can use the smart board’s InstaShare wireless presentation system to foster stronger connections with students by allowing them to move around the room as they teach, as well as invite collaboration by allowing students to share to the screen from their own device.
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Plus, educators can get started using the boards right away from any BenQ Board on campus. With a swipe of their personalized NFC card, educators can log into any BenQ Board instantly. All their settings, files, and apps are ready for them, and they have access to their chosen cloud service. This helps streamline content sharing by allowing them to pull up lessons stored anywhere, or save them, without being connected to a laptop. Plus, BenQ Boards natively integrate with leading apps, such as Kahoot, ANTON, and Genially, which are ready at login.
With the implementation of BenQ Boards, the new school year at LAN kicked off strong for students and teachers. “We’re in a digital and interactive age where there can’t be any walls around access or learning,” added Seltzer. “BenQ Boards provide an additional layer of interactivity and connectivity across campuses. Now we can log into any board and teach from one campus to another.”
