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Audio
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Visual
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[intro music begins]
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Joe Bratetich (5th grade Teacher):
I've always believed that there's a balance between preparing students for the academia for the skills and for learning about life. If you're using technology just to use it and it really isn't helping educate your students, then you're finding a toy with which to waste your time.
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Two students at a school in Pittsburgh, PA are pushing a Sharp AQUOS Board interactive display on a rolling stand through a hallway and into the front of the classroom. One of the students plugs the display into an electrical outlet. The display turns on and shows the Sharp logo.
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Megan Wysocki (5th Grade Teacher):
I think Children need uh a lot of different senses engaged when you're teaching, so they have to be able to see it and hear about it and often touch it in order to understand it.
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Three students play a Rubix cube puzzle simulation on the Sharp AQUOS Board. They take turns touching the colored cubes to spin the Rubix cube layers trying to match up all the colors on one side.
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Adam Swinchock (Director of Technology):
If you think about the evolution of the classroom, it's gone from the chalkboard to the overhead projector, to the whiteboard, to the interactive white board and now the Sharp AQUOS board.
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Joe Bratetich:
The thing that I feel most strongly about, it's very true to the way our culture is today. In society, our kids have devices, they have, you know, smart phones, they have tablets, they have computers, they're always visually stimulated in the world, outside of school. If our classrooms are unnatural with the rest of the world, it just doesn't work.
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Group of students standing in front of the Sharp AQUOS Board Interactive display working on a geometry math exercise. The math problem is displayed on the AQUOS board screen. The students mark up and write their answer to the math problem on the screen using the Overlay feature.
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Adam Swinchock:
Schools have been historically low tech and we're really working hard to break that model with the solutions that we've put in place with the Sharp AQUOS boards. It really has allowed us to do that fairly easily, with minimal investment and actual infrastructure, all of the dollars that we're spending go into the classroom.
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Adam attaches a small computer to the back of the Sharp AQUOS board display then uses the remote control to change settings.
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Adam Swinchock:
If we were to choose other solutions where speakers were actually mounted in the ceiling, we had run all the traditional cables to set locations in the classrooms. We found that the sharp AQUOS board was actually a more cost-effective solution.
Honestly, it is probably one of the best investments that we've made here in the Peters Township school district. As far as reliability, as far as configurability and as far as deployment ease. It's been absolutely amazing for us to be able to support those devices in the classroom.
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A student stands in front of the AQUOS Board screen that is displaying a map of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The student uses different colors to fill in the states and territories that were colonized by Britain, France and Spain.
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Megan Wysocki: I've been in education for a long, long time, many decades back to the film strip days. So I've been through every imaginable technology advancement and they've all had drawbacks. But this particular AQUOS board does not, I mean everything about it enhances what I do.
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Megan walks around a classroom full of students teaching a math lesson. She is holding a tablet and the image and text displayed on the tablet is mirrored on the AQUOS Board display in the front of the classroom. As Megan draws on the tablet screen, the image on the AQUOS Board display updates in real-time.
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Adam Swinchock: The value add that we get to it with the flexibility in the classroom and the interactivity piece is something that we didn't get with any other solution. The fact that we're getting students out of their seats, they really want to participate and they're excited to be a part of the classroom environment just because of that piece of technology. How do you really put a dollar figure on that?
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