Lovejoy Independent School District Installs Hundreds Of Whiteboards
by Ryan Abeling
LOVEJOY, TX—The independent school district of Lovejoy, TX recently chose Hitachi StarBoard FXDUO interactive whiteboards for its classrooms. With more than 230 boards installed, it was the largest deployment to date of the company’s brandnew boards.
The district had been looking for a better way to connect to its new generation of students, and Hitachi’s whiteboards seemed like a viable option, as Lovejoy’s assistant superintendent of operations, Dennis Wommack, explained. “What we were trying to accomplish was making the classroom setting the most engaging as possible, and especially trying to bring that environment to what students today want and need to hold their attention.”
Lovejoy, TX’s independent school district recently chose Hitachi StarBoard FXDUO interactive whiteboards for its classrooms.
For such a large installation throughout the school district, Lovejoy called on Troxell Communications to provide the boards and North Texas Communications to install them. “I think the challenging part was the quantity we put in at one time,” Wommack said. “We did over 230 boards in K-12 classrooms all at one time. It was a lot of work—putting them in, getting them all wired up, and getting all the PCs loaded with the software was time consuming.”
To train an entire school district in a new technology is no simple task, but the teachers at Lovejoy were willing to make the effort for their students, as Wommack noted. “Without our partnership with Troxell and Hitachi we wouldn’t have been able to do that so easily. I didn’t know if our teachers would take to these boards, but I was surprised because they embraced this change and technology. They came during the summer, on their own time, to be trained on how to use this technology. We had a gentlema from Hitachi come out, Ken Holst, and we had originally scheduled three days of training, but we had such a significant response from the teachers that we had to extend it to five days.”
Over 230 Hitachi StarBoards were installed in K-12 classrooms all at one time.
Choosing the StarBoards was no simple task, as Wommack said. “We chose the Hitachi because it had a few items that we thought were above and beyond the others. The big thing is how the board is manufactured. With the Hitachi, there are no internal workings on the board itself; it uses a system of cameras and reflectors. The writing surface itself is just a whiteboard, you can use dry erase markers, your finger, there’s no definitive instrument you have to hold to use it. It also can provide dual user capability, where two students can use the board at the same time.”
Wommack expects to see more and more districts jump at the chance to use this type of technology in their classrooms in the future. “I think a lot more schools will be using these soon. In public education we have to be willing to change and mold our environments for the learning styles of the kids we’re dealing with today. Those districts that don’t provide that type of environment and adopt these new technologies will be left behind.”
For more information, check out a video on the installation put together by Griffin PR at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXd1-604zg.
