It was a great opportunity to be a guest, enjoy Canadian hospitality and share insights on blended learning and active classrooms with Smart Technologies. It was good too to share the experience and learn from an informed squad of Scottish Educators.  This post will reflect on what I learned from Smart and what I learned from my colleagues and some things I will follow up on.

It was a privilege to meet the Smart Technologies team and tour their operations in Calgary. The term “smart board” has become synonymous with interactive panels globally and in terms of product development they are still top of the class and deserve to be the generic name for interactive panels. 

However, in large tech exhibitions like BETT, where many screens and competitors are showcased, this can be lost and there still can be a general scepticism from the educational technology community about interactive boards and their impact on learning and teaching. This scepticism is often related to whether such panels support outdated models of learning if all learners and teachers have individual devices.

It's important to reassess this role, as interactive panels are crucial in learning spaces, facilitating blended learning and fostering collaboration and new approaches to learning and teaching. It was good to hear how the panels are used in new ways across schools in Scotland from the delegates and great too to visit the Edmonton School district to hear how smart boards are deployed and used across the district. It was great to meet and hear from real teachers on how they used their smartboards and associated software. It was interesting too to hear they had moved to Smart Boards from Epson data projectors.

Key takeaways include:

• Smart Technologies demonstrates a profound understanding of pedagogy and the role of their interactive panels in supporting active and blended learning.
• Their products are sustainable, reliable, and robust, as observed in the product development process.
• The software notebook is easy to use and Lumio supports a range of interactive activities.
•  It is easy for teachers to have multiple windows and applications open and to move across these and autosave they or the students’ annotations with smart ink
• Lumio offers great tools for whole class activities that learners can engage with from their own devices and/or on the smartboard.
• Credit to Smart they do a lot to track globally the digital landscape in education. It is worth accessing their free bench marking tool. (See how our group did below)
• They do some exemplary work too around neurodiversity and learning. 
• IT teams will like new easier ways to manage an estate of SmartBoards. 

I had several questions and challenges, which were all addressed. 

Smart Technologies excels in sustainability and performance metrics, and they now offer plugins like the AM60 to update older panels and give them longer operational lives. The panels integrate well with OneDrive, Google Apps, and virtual learning environments like Canvas , D2L and Moodle.

With multi-point touch capabilities, learners can engage in collaborative activities, making it easy and accessible for both teachers and students.

Hearing about the impact of Smart Boards in Midlothian, combined with the rollout of Chromebooks to all learners, was impressive and very similar to what we saw in action in Edmonton schools.

Unlike other panels that require being on the same network for full feature use, Smart Technologies has solved this securely. They demonstrated effective screen sharing and shared activities, allowing users to bring their own devices. I’ve battled that challenge in the past, for lots of security reasons IT teams don’t like unmanaged devices coming on to their networks.

While I initially thought from a college perspective, innovations like pre-programmed MFC chipped objects showed clear applications for primary and secondary classrooms. These could also fit into college delivery with some adjustments.

Their new interactive podium is ideal for lecture theatres or hybrid teaching, and the range of upcoming developments embracing Android 15, were very impressive and if I was still in a College I would be getting colleagues to check out Lumio as a potential improvement on Kahoot and some of the other solutions we have in the class activity space. I’d be exploring  purchase of an interactive podium for our theatre too.

My takeaways from Scottish presenters: Meeting the next generation of educational innovators was inspiring. Mid Lothian shared a story on inclusive digital transformation using Chromebooks and smartboards, while others discussed Smartboards with learner’s own devices, open learning initiatives, curriculum innovations for all school years, and VR headsets to understand neurodiversity. Collectively they are seeking solutions for digital credentials and better community support in educational technology and curriculum development. These concerns echo current uncertainties at Education Scotland and SQA.

The Gangs All Here