“Alberta is on the forefront of investing in technology in schools,” says Adams. “Alberta Education and the Edmonton Public School Board have always been willing to be pioneers in a variety of different directions and in their willingness to experiment.”
Besides investing in IWBs, Alberta Education is completing a research program called Emerge One-to-One Laptop Learning, where select schools provide each student with a laptop to work from. And some schools are going even further. Richard S. Fowler Catholic Junior High School in St. Albert is putting an iPhone or iPod Touch in every student’s hand to share work with each other and their teachers through the Wi-Fi network and to use programs like Etch a Sketch to draw diagrams.
Erika Englert, a Grade 1 teacher at Wild Rose Elementary, says the Smart Board was part of almost every lesson last year, and she now wonders how she ever taught without it. She says her students are more engaged when she uses the Smart Board because it makes everything seem like a game.
Many teachers share Englert’s excitement about IWBs, but not all of them. “When we first got them, teachers were afraid of the technology,” says Paul Borchert, teacher and resource facilitator at St. Thomas More Junior High, who adds that educators are having to spend more time creating lessons for the new technology.
Dolores Powers, a veteran teacher at Wild Rose who is retiring in 2011, says teachers have much to learn and little time to learn it. “I spent too much time setting up [the IWB] and not enough time interacting with the children,” she says. Powers also believes some educators feel pressure to use the IWB in their classroom because, at $5,000, it’s too expensive a machine to leave sitting idle.
For some schools, the question of how to offset costs for technology next year has yet to be determined. Some, like Wild Rose, have raised funds through casinos. To install an IWB in each of its 11 classrooms cost the school $46,000. No other capital purchases were made that year; funding for art and physical education were shelved for another term.