The sound of nails on a chalkboard is a distant nightmare for students and teachers at the Albany Academy and Albany Academy for Girls, as an unconventional form of blackboard has recently been donated to the schools.
Eighteen boards, called Smartboards, were donated as a combined gift from the Albany Academy and Albany Academy for Girls Class of 1958. With them, teachers will be able to teach courses such as science and math using interactive technology that combines the white board with computer software.
With them, teachers can play a video and then stop the video in the middle and draw on the video frame, pointing specific things out to the students, said Academic Dean for Albany Academies Stacey Giordano.
This type of classroom technology seems to benefit students even outside of the classroom, as the digital `notes` the teacher can take on the board can be saved, copied and even sent over the Internet to each student in the class.
It is considerations like these that influenced the Class of ’58 when they were deciding on a class gift to donate to the schools.
`We decided we wanted to do something that was more permanent than the endowment for scholarships or for professors or that sort of thing,` said Peter Kermani, a member of the class and of the committee that decided on the Smartboards.
`We wanted to do something that would have an immediate benefit to the school and help them with attracting new students.`
Kermani said the committee was fascinated with what the students can do with the Smartboards after he received his own demonstration.
`It makes the student part of the educational process in a way that was never thought possible when I was there,` he said. `Now they can sit there with their laptops and not only answer questions, and all of them do it in their own way, but they have access to all the information that’s on the Internet.`
According to Kermani, the boards cost about $6,944 a piece, or $125,000 total, and that the expensive part of the systems are not the boards themselves, but the software that is needed to use them.
`An upperclassmen science program is more expensive than, say, an underclassmen reading program ` not that they are any less important,` he said. `That’s why you really couldn’t say how much a Smartboard costs per classroom.`
Giordano said that Smartboards are most useful, and costly, in the more difficult and advanced fields, and since the school received 18 boards and enough funding for the more expensive programs, they decided to put them to use this year for upperclassmen.
The boards arrived at the schools mid-August. Giordano said the schools are looking to have them installed in early September.
But past the installation, Giordano said the Smartboards provide even more to the teachers who operate them.
`Our teacher learning groups are going to have K-12 teachers working together so that’s the entire faculty coming together,` Giordano said.
Over the course of upcoming weeks in the beginning of the school year, teachers will be forced to gather several times to learn how to use the Smartboards to the full advantage of their classrooms.
But in that time, the Class of 1958 will not stop with the 18 Smartboards already in the school, as Kermani said, `We’re not done with pursuing technology.`
The group plans to donate even more to the schools that helped build their future, and, according to Kermani, are excited to enhance the education of those who will continue to enter the schools’ halls many years after them. “
