In the winter break of 2019, the Taipei City Department of Education embarked on a project that aimed to modernize the classrooms of several municipal schools across the city’s 12 administrative districts. Among these are the Ren Ai Junior High School in Da’an and the Shijian Junior High School in Wenshan.

This smart classroom initiative is in line with the city government’s goal to enhance the quality of education by phasing out old teaching tools and adopting new technologies that facilitate active forms of learning.

Giving context to the project, Tsai I-Chang, founder of the Smart School Alliance, explains that in order for smart classrooms to fulfill their purpose of transforming education, the necessary IT infrastructure and educational technologies must be in place.

Many of the schools in Taipei still used traditional classroom tools such as chalkboards as their default mode of instruction. In order to extend what teachers and students can do during classes, they needed an edtech solution that would allow them to not only write on a board, but also display presentations, play multimedia content, and access cloud-based educational resources. 

Other factors they had to take into consideration were installation and support. They needed a solutions provider and systems integrator who could both implement the new edtech in time for the resumption of classes and provide training to their teaching staff.

BenQ and our local partners were able to deliver on all of these requirements.

The city government acquired several units of the BenQ Board Pro and BenQ Board Master so they could convert a total of 296 traditional classrooms into smart classrooms. Each of the boards come with the EZWrite whiteboarding software, the InstaShare wireless screen sharing solution, the BenQ Account Management System (AMS) for easy access to teacher’s lesson files, a web browser for cloud-based educational content, and extended support to other active learning platforms like Kahoot!

“With the BenQ displays, we can put digital teaching and learning into practice,” says Tseng Wen-Lung, principal at Ren Ai Junior High School.

Zhuang Feng-Zhao, the school’s director of academic affairs explains: “By the time the teachers returned for the new semester, they were immediately able to use their new boards.”.

He recounts how the transition from chalkboards to interactive displays had an immediate impact on how their classes were run. The display’s cloud whiteboarding feature, for example, allowed teachers to step away from the board while teaching. Equipped with tablets, they could continue annotating while moving freely around the classroom. “Being able to walk around the classroom and check on their students’ progress was a big advantage,” Zhuang says.

“It’s great for teacher-student interaction and adds variety and fun to our lessons,” adds Zhong Ling-Zhen, Chinese teacher at the Ren-Ai Junior High School. She explains how her students are now able to simultaneously work together on the same digital whiteboard even from their seats. And because she can see their progress in real time, she can check their work immediately.

“We discuss a lot of news and current affairs in class… and I find that the interactive display lets me interact with my students more,” says Liao Wen-Ling, Social Studies teacher at Shijian Junior High School. For group discussions, she uses the BenQ display’s web browser with the annotation tool. Liao and her class load articles from news websites and then relate them to the topics covered in class. She’s able to highlight key details in the text and make annotations directly over the page based on her students’ answers.

Feedback from students has also been positive, with some even noting how the new hands-on nature of their classes has made learning more enjoyable.

Liao Chun-Ying, principal at Shijian Junior High School says, “Our smart classrooms [are] friendlier, more dynamic, and ready to meet the changing education trends in the future.”