Learning boards

SCI-TECH SCENE | Deerfield firm helps bring interactive education to at-risk kids  By Sandra Guy

Chicago Sun-Times

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Kindergartners run the morning meeting at Schiller Park School District 81 on interactive whitebeards, creating patterns on a calendar to identify the day and month. On unannounced days, a number greets the students, and the students find different ways to represent it on the board.

The activities are saved on the teacher's computer so the kids' progress can be saved and tracked.

The district installed 36 whiteboards, called ActivBoards, a year ago in its K-4 classrooms at Kennedy and Washington elementary schools to project laptop images including Internet pages, videos, photos, demonstrations and movable tools.

The cost -- $6,000 per classroom -- was covered by Title I grant money and a $10,000 BP grant. Title I funding is distributed to schools and school districts with a high percentage of students from low-income families. Also, Best Buy gave $5,000 for software updates used by Washington School's fine arts department.

"The computer, projector and [white]board work together so that you can search the Internet on [the board], create a Word document and annotate over it, and project videos from United Streaming, Brain Pop or those created by the teachers," said Kathy Risolvo, technology facilitator at the schools.

Teachers initially upset that the whiteboard would take up a wall realized they could project a far greater variety of material on the whiteboard than they could have done on a wall, Risolvo said.

Melissa Gosche, a third-grade teacher and winner of the 2009 Educator of the Year award from Illinois Computing Educators, said, "The courage my students possess inspires me every day to teach technology skills that most teachers would be afraid to even try.

"I do not accept the notion that at-risk students can't understand 21st century technology and are not deserving of this technology because they do not have computers at home," she said. "The first time many of my students even saw a computer was at Kennedy School, which would scare even the most seasoned teacher, but I'm proud that I have accomplished something special within my classroom by providing a multitude of opportunities to use technology."

The ActivBoards also let students respond to questions using handheld clickers that enable answers to show up instantly on the screen.

"We can see immediately how many students got the answer correct and how many got it wrong, so the teacher can set up flexible [study] groups," Gosche said.

The technology underlying the ActivBoards includes four high-speed T-1 lines and high-speed wireless access throughout the three-building school complex.

A Deerfield-based company underpins the technology from behind the scenes.

The company, which changed its name to Techcare from Graphtech Systems LLC last month, guarantees small businesses online uptime, accessibility and a fixed cost for managing and attending the service.

"We've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in our remote hosting and remote operations center that we can provide to small businesses in a scalable way," said Steve Feldman, president and CEO.  "We're fanatics about the way we take care of our clients," said Feldman, who got his start working for small CPA firms.

Feldman got the entrepreneurial itch and partnered with a retail client 22 years ago.

"Our focus gradually moved from providing computers and networks to taking care of our clients' technology, supporting hardware, software, planning and disaster recovery," Feldman said.

The business, which garnered $9 million in revenue last year, a 40 percent increase from the prior year, takes on the risk of supporting its clients' networks and being responsible for the networks' operations. It employs 31 full time.

The next step at the Schiller Park school district will be to buy iPod Touch handheld devices so the students can access the Internet more often.