From Naval Ships to Grade 5 Desks: How Calgary’s SMART Technologies is Redefining Classroom Connection in the 21st Century

When the Grade 5 students at Calgary’s Douglasdale School began their unit on the Royal Canadian Navy, they weren’t flipping through static textbooks or watching grainy videos. Instead, they stood in front of a SMART Board, speaking directly with naval officers stationed hundreds of kilometres away.

Questions came quickly. What’s it like to sleep on a ship? How do you navigate during a storm? What kind of training do you need? The officers answered in real time, sharing stories, showing images, and turning what could have been an abstract history lesson into a living conversation.

“It’s almost making the world a little bit smaller, much more accessible,” said Edie Reichardt, principal at Douglasdale School. “The students were engaged in a way that showed they understood these were real people with real stories.”

That idea — technology as an enabler of human connection — is the through-line in SMART Technologies’ story. Founded in Calgary in 1987, the company invented the first SMART Board and has spent nearly four decades refining how people learn and collaborate in classrooms, boardrooms, and beyond. Its interactive displays and software are now in schools and offices in more than 175 countries.

Yet, some of the company’s most telling examples of impact remain in its own backyard.

The Douglasdale Navy project is one. Another comes from Ontario’s Peel District School Board, where educators are using Lumio, SMART’s online learning platform, to make lessons more inclusive and responsive to students’ needs.

Peel’s teachers have embraced culturally responsive pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning, which means recognizing that no two students absorb material in the same way. With Lumio, a single lesson can blend text, images, polls, games, and open-ended questions, all in an interactive format. Students can respond anonymously, work in pairs, or tackle challenges as a class. Teachers get real-time feedback to adjust their approach on the spot.

The goal, says SMART, is to give every student a voice and ensure lessons resonate with different backgrounds and abilities. That emphasis on accessibility is shaping how districts across Canada think about technology as not as a standalone product, but as a platform for equity and engagement.

It’s a far cry from the early days of the SMART Board, when simply moving a digital pen across a large screen was enough to spark wonder. Today’s classrooms expect technology to be seamless, adaptable, and invisible in the best sense of the word. Students shouldn’t be thinking about the hardware; they should be thinking about the conversation they’re having or the problem they’re solving.

For SMART, headquartered in Calgary’s Beltline district, keeping that focus requires constant iteration. The company’s engineers, designers, and education specialists work with teachers to understand where learning stalls and how interaction — whether between a teacher and student or a group of students — can be made richer.

“Innovation isn’t about putting more screens in classrooms,” said Nicholas Svensson, CEO of SMART Technologies. “It’s about making sure those screens spark curiosity, foster dialogue, and help every student feel seen.”

In an age where education technology can sometimes feel impersonal, SMART is doubling down on the opposite.  The company’s work with schools like Douglasdale and Peel shows that the answer lies in designing for interaction first, technology second. It’s a philosophy born in Canada, but one that resonates in classrooms around the world.

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This article is part of CCI’s new “By Canadian Innovators” series, which showcases how members of the Council of Canadian Innovators work with homegrown companies to fuel their growth and make Canada more prosperous. Each story in this series highlights the unique contributions of these companies to building a more prosperous, innovation-driven economy. To learn more about the companies CCI works with to build a more prosperous Canada, visit our member directory.