In 1999, two brothers began working with Puget Sound school districts to support structured cabling projects funded by Erate.  The company, then known as Ernst Communications, had a reputation for solving the toughest challenges in classroom connectivity.  While in this work, they began to see that teachers and their students needed better ways to utilize their newly connected classroom computers.  This was the era of the SMARTboard, a classroom technology that revolutionized how teachers prepared lessons and transformed how students would interact and engage with information.  It was at this pivotal moment that the brothers were approached by the Northshore School District to install an ActivBoard from a small UK-based technology company called Promethean as part of a technology exploration pilot.  Northshore knew Ernst’s reputation for solving tough installation challenges and they needed a team that could install the ActivBoard without damaging classroom infrastructure (just in case the technology didn’t deliver).

The brothers took on the project and saw firsthand the power of the Promethean ActivBoard to transform the learning experience for students.  With leaders in the Northshore School District, they witnessed how teachers shifted their pedagogy and watched the excitement as students were asked to utilize new tools to explore their world from the ActivBoard.  It was at this time the brothers shifted gears to become fully vested in the work of digital transformation in schools and they needed a new name to represent their newfound focus.  Ernst Communications became Advanced Classroom Technologies (ACT).  From classroom to classroom, from one school to the next, ACT delivered digital transformation to school districts by providing consultative sales, bespoke installation services, and ongoing technical support for educators in the Pacific Northwest.