Cooliris Enters the Classroom

Denver Academy in Colorado is well-known for the innovative teaching techniques they employ to help students with learning differences and unique learning profiles. Teachers at Denver Academy are always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to present their material.

The most recent addition to DA’s educational tools and strategies is the integration of Cooliris technology on Smart Boards “ interactive, touch-screen whiteboards they received as part of a grant from the Morgridge Family Foundation’s 21st Century Classrooms Collaboration.

In the classroom, Cooliris is used in image research, art history lessons, and videos and demos of science processes, and a number of other applications.

“The [Cooliris] technology allows the students to interact with artwork in ways that were not possible before, says Kris Fritzsche, Arts and Technology Coordinator at Denver Academy. For example, when we teach art history, we can use the slide show feature to pull up all the works from a particular period or artist.”

Even lessons on the water cycle had students vying for a position at the SmartBoard. The Cooliris wall of images depicting evaporation, condensation, cloud formation, and precipitation enables the teacher to progress fluidly through each stage of the cycle. Then, the teacher brings up new images where the descriptions disappeared and students could come to the board and write the details of each stage over the picture.

“The addition of the Smart Boards and Cooliris technology have transformed the ways students interact with the topic we are studying,” said Evan Borg, Head of Elementary Schools at Denver Academy. “Using Cooliris in my classes helps engage the students and reinforces the subject matter because it allows students to associate terms with images. This has proven especially valuable for those students who are visual learners.”

Denver Academy’s success at teaching with the combination of Smart Boards and Cooliris points towards a new direction for classroom education: a media-rich environment that truly captures the attention of the younger, technologically-savvy generations and puts an entire world’s worth of information at their fingertips.