“ROTATE – turn it ’round! Translate – shift it left, right, up, or down.”
Gone are the days when being in the classroom meant long tedious hours of copying information off the chalk board.
For Norkem Park Primary School students, learning now consists of singing, dancing and watching stimulating lesson videos off their new smart boards.
One of which is the Transformation Song, which explains geometry through music by singing about polygons, circles,cubes and angles – instead of the traditional “teacher draws on the board, students copy down” method.
And all of this comes to life through a smart board.
What is a smart board, you ask? Well basically, it’s probably every teacher and school child’s dream come true.
Put simply, the smart board is an interactive whiteboard that uses a digital touch-screen (for example scrolling and right mouse-click) in the same way as a normal computer.
All class lessons are taught from the board, and teachers are able to write or draw on the touch-screen boards as well as navigate through the system.
This new development is similar to the Smart Schools project recently launched by Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi at township schools around the province. The project aims to eventually have all schools going paperless in Gauteng.
Caleb Rorich, a grade six maths teacher and also in charge of ICT at the school, said the transformation from chalk boards to the smart boards has been advantageous not only to the teachers, but to the students as well.
“The interactive environment of the classroom helps the learners to visually see the work and therefore able to learn things a lot quicker and remember things a lot easier with the use of lyrics and videos,” Rorich explained.
The learners themselves expressed a new found excitement in coming to class and actually looking forward to the lessons.
Rorich also mentioned that some of the learners marks have even improved since the boards were introduced.
According to Rorich, the school funded the digital migration itself through various fund-raising projects done by the SGB.
By 2016, learners in grades four to seven will hopefully all receive tablets, which they can use to download the class lessons and take them with them, as opposed to writing down the lessons into their exercise books.
