Full STEAM Ahead – Interactive Displays at Schools

Because STEM/STEAM elevate the role of technology and interactive learning, they require a whole raft of new tools. These may be costly to integrate into schools, and also impose training curves on educators and students. Unlike liberal arts, where books and lectures are the primary tools, science needs various and more specific devices and toolsets. These include lab kits, testing equipment, video displays, and increasingly even 3D printers. 

Interactive displays help mitigate some of those costs by providing a multi-role platform. For working on content, showing content, and classroom interaction, there’s nothing even remotely as effective as good interactive displays. And while ideally every student should have their own tablet or laptop while in class, in reality that’s usually not possible, and BenQ’s here to help. Interactive displays offer smart, intuitive, and easy to use platforms that are accessible to all students. 

With an interactive display that’s high quality, high fidelity, and easily accessible, you can simulate diverse experiments, tests, and processes that would normally be entirely physical. And physical means more complex and expensive. Chemistry and physics especially benefit from this, with interactive displays allowing for demonstrations that reach everyone in attendance and that respond to input in real time. For mathematics, equations and calculations appear to students with increased clarity and may be altered and modified instantly without the mess blackboards and whiteboards entail. Dedicated tools that work on interactive displays make math much easier for students to understand and enjoy. 

Large and eye-catching interactive displays have a “wow” factor to them previously only found on big screen TVs or even movie theaters. Compared to the sleepy vibe of traditional classrooms with their largely non-interactive structure and old-fashioned books, smart classrooms with a focus on STEM/STEAM consistently prove to be more engaging. Greater engagement of course translates into improved knowledge retention and an overall better approach to learning on the part of students. 

Without needing a lot of complex equipment, interactive displays offer a big and bold centerpiece for classrooms where knowledge and concepts can be clearly visualized in an attractive, engaging manner. A simple example of this may be something as mundane as a geography lesson. Whereas old style classes relied on atlases, with interactive displays teachers bring up Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Street View to enable virtual school trips. That’s a lot more engaging that flipping pages in a large and heavy book, which rarely retains student interest for very long. 

Emerging classroom methodologies rely on hybrid learning, blended learning, and flipped learning. All of these boil down to a shift in the flow of learning. While of course teachers still provide knowledge, the driving force of the class has moved on to the students. Instead of lectures followed by homework, flipped classrooms have students do their own research and preparation at home, followed by discussion, collaboration, and verification in class. This approach allows students to take an initiative, explore topics in a way that appeals to them, and then delve deeper into said topics as guided by a teacher. As time passes, a growing body of evidence now indicates that flipped classes far outdo older teaching methods and models with regards to student engagement and success. 

But to do that, flipped classrooms need the right tools, as we said before. And interactive displays form the basis for those tools and bring it all together for a successful STEM/STEAM curriculum.