Preparations for new SMART Boards

Next week, my SMART Board installation crew arrives early on Monday morning. So this week is mostly dedicated to preparing for them. We're having about 38 new SMART Boards installed and moving 4 more. It's very exciting, but also requires a lot of pre-planning.

Since the SMART Boards and all the related installation stuff is so big, my local vendor/installer just has them shipped to us. I was a little concerned when nothing but speakers had arrived at the end of last week, but it's been trickling in all week. I think everything is here, but I've got to go and do a count to be certain.

I've been working on making a VERY rough sketch of each room and indicating where the SMART Board should be placed. This, of course, means that white boards have to be moved over, replaced with a shorter board, or removed completely. I started this process before school was out so that I could talk to each teacher about the placement. Now I'm just making a clean sketch for the installers. I've found that the very best thing is to have the SMART Board mounted on the wall and the projector hung permanently from the ceiling. I tried a portable SMART Board and projector, but it's really a pain for the teachers to set up. Also, hanging the projector from the ceiling means that the teacher's body doesn't cast as much of a shadow on the SMART Board.

The electricians are here this week putting electricity in the ceiling of each room for the projector. Thank God for our building manager. He's been extremely helpful in making sure the technical prep work gets done.

Another item that the school is buying as a part of this project is a DVD/VCR combo for each room that is getting a SMART Board. Doing this means that we don't have to keep buying TVs and we can start getting rid of the old media carts. Hooray! Our head librarian is also excited. So I've been shopping and ultimately found the quantity of units I need at eCost.com. I had to call and talk to a real person (very 20th century), but they came through a terrific price.

Well, that's this week's happenings. Hopefully next week the installations will begin and move quickly!