To prepare students for the future, educators must foster creativity, effective communications, problem-solving skills, and collaboration. BenQ Boards have emerged as the ideal solution to support these educational objectives. When the Leadership Academy Network (LAN) in Fort Worth decided to update their old smart boards, selecting ones that aligned with their mission and fully prepared students became paramount. BenQ Boards proved to be the perfect fit.

LAN, a pioneering partnership between Fort Worth Independent School District and TXWES University, aims to enhance learning outcomes at the district's six PK-8 Leadership Academies. Their mission revolves around accelerating student achievement through service and an unwavering commitment to excellence, including their approach to technology upgrades.

The factors that went into the school’s decision were simple but critical:

“Number one, is it good for students? And two, is it good for teachers?” said Alex Seltzer, M.ED., LAN Executive Director of Operations. “My job is to make sure that teachers and students have exactly what they need. It was a yes to both questions when we evaluated the BenQ Boards.”

BenQ Boards’ active learning features position schools at the forefront of technology. Many of the award-winning smart board features are the result of partnerships with schools and continuous feedback from educators. This includes the BenQ Board’s EZ Write whiteboard and annotation tools that allow students to work hands-on with concepts. Educators and students can draw, take screen grabs, and easily incorporate them into the lesson with additional annotations and graphics to further comprehension. Also, the smart board can record, save, and share lessons easily. Teachers simply tap the record button on the onscreen menu to create tutorials on the fly. These can be saved to the network, the cloud such as Google Classroom, or any connected storage for students to refer back to later. To drive collaboration opportunities, multiple students can work at the smart board simultaneously.

“With the day in age that we’re in now, technology is literally everywhere. Our kids have to be used to navigating technology, and what better place than in the classroom,” said Jayla Johnson, LAFO, 8^th grade math.

The BenQ Boards are also providing educators at LAN with what they need do their jobs better. For example, they can use the smart board’s InstaShare wireless presentation system to foster stronger connections with students by allowing them to move around the room as they teach. InstaShare eliminates the need for student and educator laptop and devices to be physically connected to the board or to stay at the front of the classroom in order to teach or present. More importantly it invites collaboration by allowing students to share to the screen from their own device, and multiple students can share simultaneously. And with two-way touch, teachers and students can interact with what’s being shared on their devices for increased engagement.

“I’m the teacher who likes to move around. I’m always interacting with my students,” said Johnson. “Being able to move around the room and still be able to use my BenQ Board wirelessly is phenomenal.”

Finally, educators can get started using the boards right away — from any BenQ Board on campus. With a swipe of their personalized NFC card, educators can log into any BenQ Board instantly. All their settings, files, and apps are ready for them, and they have access to their chosen cloud service. This helps streamline content sharing by allowing them to pull up lessons stored anywhere, or save them, all without being connected to a laptop. Plus, BenQ Boards natively integrate with leading apps, such as Kahoot, ANTON, and Genially, which are ready at login. This allows teachers to use their favorite apps right from the board without connecting and mirroring their laptop. In addition, the smart boards’ special backgrounds, templates, and tools — timer, scoreboard, number draw, board split, calculator, and ruler — are fast and easy ways to improve classroom management, engagement, and comprehension from day one.

All these features have also opened the door to other opportunities and benefits for using the BenQ Boards. When the school has guest speakers, they can easily present just by wirelessly casting to the screen from the device. Or they can share presentations remotely.

“We’re in a digital and interactive age where there can’t be any walls around access or learning,” said Alex Seltzer, M.ED., LAN Executive Director of Operations. “BenQ Boards provide an additional layer of interactivity and connectivity across campuses. Now we can log into any board and teach from one campus to another.”

With the implementation of BenQ Boards, the new school year at LAN kicked off strong for students and teachers. Students have future-ready tools that make learning exciting and achieve success. Likewise, the intuitive features empowered teachers to create active and personalized learning experiences with confidence and ease.