Company chairman donates “Active Learning” Devices (Interactive Whiteboards) to two public schools
In January 2020, Chairman Hiroki Miyauchi of JS Language School’s operating company, General Learning Systems Inc., and his younger brother Mr. Masaki Miyauchi (Fuji Media Holdings, Inc. Chairman and CEO) donated Ricoh Japan-made interactive whiteboards (D6510 complete set https://www.ricoh.co.jp/iwb/d6510) to two schools (Hagi shiritsu Tama Elementary School and Hiroshima Kenritsu Fukuyama Iyo High School).
Since General Learning Systems Inc. was established in 1974, it has steadily yielded better and better results through effective education and innovative leadership. While this event is only a modest one, it is nonetheless a donation that we can say contributes to public education.
From 2015, among their guidelines for the education curriculum, MEXT stressed the importance of “Active Learning” and they unveiled plans to move toward it. However, due to issues such as slow implementation of learning tech, and underdeveloped teaching methodology, etc., we still have yet to see concrete progress.
“Active Learning” is the concept of changing our current education system, which currently revolves around students only passively listening to the teacher’s lesson, to one centered on students taking an active part in their own learning.
In other words, they aim to move away from systematic learning via a teacher, and toward students and their fellow classmates taking individual actions, and discovering problems to consider and solve.
In order for this change to actually happen, there has to be a big change in terms of textbooks, classroom environment, and teaching methods.
This will involve students learning to give their opinion, discussing their opinions with others, debating, and reaching a conclusion on the issue they are looking at. The Interactive Whiteboard will act as an effective tool that will allow many students to take part in planning and producing these kinds of productive conversations.
The Interactive Whiteboard’s essential functions are:
1. Not only can it precisely display and hide key information in various formats such as video and audio, but it can also combine and overlap information. Prohibited words and phrases can be manually modified at the touch of a button, too.
2. It can display the whole class’s opinions and ideas individually, in groups, and it allows students to share and arrange their opinions right there on the board.
3. It can display and process data from computers, the internet, etc.
4. It displays data on a big screen, which can be saved as it is, printed out and handed out.
This, plus many other functions that create faster and denser information exchange show the Interactive Whiteboard to be far more useful than normal whiteboards and text books.
From next year, as according to the country’s budget, there are plans to continue on with equipping all learning environments with interactive textbooks, interactive whiteboards, etc. But for now, we have been able to go one step ahead and introduce these large-scale devices that are being put to use. It is with the goal of being useful to the implementation of “Active Learning” in mind that this donation was made.
Furthermore, the schools that the donations were made to were schools the Miyauchi brothers graduated from, and so their decision to donate to these schools in particular was influenced by their gratitude toward them.
General Learning Systems Inc. will continue to improve on the education provided by JS Language school, and always strive to make contributions to society in general, no matter how large or small a contribution it may be.
By Annice Fieldsend：JSLS instructor.