Have you used an interactive whiteboard like the SMART Board? What do you think, are the worth it?
1. Do you think they're worth it?
2. How do you use it?
3. What brand do you have?
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M$15 Answers
If all you are looking to do is capture discussion, then just take pictures of standard white boards with a digital camera.
There are also some great applications in education - some elementary and middle school teacher colleagues of mine find them very useful in the classroom - particularly with special software that is designed for teaching interactive white board lessons. But I suspect that's not what you're looking for.
I work in Audiovisual Services at The University of New Hampshire. We've looked at all of the major players in great detail and my opinion is that there are a couple of variations that can work really well depending on your situation.
The interactive whiteboard we like (rather a lot) is the Polyvision ENO
http://www.polyvision.com/tabid/155/objectid/70/default.aspx
The key difference is that with the ENO there is no electronics in the white board. It looks and works like a (very nice) traditional whiteboard when you have the projector off. But embedded behind the surface is a special magnetic grid that allows their electronic pen to locate itself.
So the system is their whiteboard - which has no cables and no electronics (nothing to break or upgrade)
a standard computer, and the projector of your choice, and then the ENO pen which connects to the computer via bluetooth.
The key to a good install of a system like this in my mind is the projector. You need a projector with extraordinarily wide throw, so it can be placed very close to the white board. That makes a huge difference in minimizing the shadows that are cast by the person writing on the board. The easiest thing to do is get a system where a short throw projector of the sort I'm describing is included with the system, or a good AV system integrator to recommend one for your setup.
The second option is not an interactive whiteboard as such, but it serves the same purpose - The SMART Podium interactive pen displays. These are basically Wacom LCD monitor pen tablets with some custom buttons and software, and they work great. For myself I prefer to write on something small, and relatively horizontal, and have what I'm doing apear on the projection screen (as well as the screen I'm writing on...)
Hope that helps.
Andy
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M$
1. Do you think they're worth it?
Absolutely not. They are horrible. First of all, they are placed right in the middle of our whiteboard so that leaves about 50cm of writing space on each side. Writing on these boards is a messy process. The handwriting is mostly illegible. Our teacher attempted to use it for our Mathematics classes but we eventually moved to a Smart board-free location.
It's also really bad at detecting accidental touches. Anything can trigger it. In case you don't know how it works, it's a pressure sensitive system and it detects what 'marker' is in use by a sensor in the marker-holder-place. Sensor detects what 'marker' is not currently in its place so it assumes that the teacher is holding it and writing with it. This raises many issues, for example, the teacher cannot hold 2 markers at the same time to switch between colours effectively.
The 'eraser' is accurate and it causes a lot of grievances. Attempting to wipe out half of an equation can result to losing the whole equation. It cannot detect the size of the pressure area so it asumes it has something like a 2cm radius.
These can't be moved easily so the teacher is stuck and is forced to use it. Having 50 minute periods also works against us because by the time the teacher turns the darn thing on, attempts to use it just to open the appropriate files and if, just if, everything decides to work then we might have everything working in just about 5 minutes. Non-geeks are hopeless with technology, especially when they don't know how it works.
2. How do you use it?
The teacher intended to use it as a whiteboard but as he does solutions on the board, he saves it as a PDF document and emails it to the class. This would also come with the lecture notes. But it is too much work for an everyday lesson. We copy whatever is on the board anyway and whoever is away that lesson can just borrow a book from a fellow classmate.
No other classes of mine use them (the sciences, english, humanities...). I know of one teacher who utilises them in the school and apparently it's for keynote presentations.
My brother's primary school also have it in most of their classrooms. When he was little, the teacher used to select a student or two to stand up, go to the board and then as an exercise select what day it is and probably draw something or do a little quiz.
3. What brand do you have?
SMART. http://smarttech.com/ (I'm unsure how these compare to other products- I've only ever use these)
I ask you, technology is supposed to advance education, but it is doing exactly the opposite. What use, that I have mentioned can't be achieved by means of pen and paper, normal whiteboards and normal data projectors? They're costly and more of an annoyance than they actually help. As a geek, I strongly discourage this 'technology' - at least for educational purposes. (I'm not sure how they're used in businesses and if they fail this miserably in education then why should they excel there too?). I have never come across another person who has benefited from their use. Not only do the teachers get frustrated but so do the students...
I'm a senior high schooler who's experienced the woes of 'Smart boards'
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M$
Hey i've written an article here that might be of help. I'm a secondary English teacher, i've used Promthean's ActivClassroom for years and couldn't do without it. I am also a SMART exemplary educator and train in Easiteach too. The article might help answer some of your questions. IT really is down to the person who uses it though... It's just another (very cool) teaching aid. Here's the link: http://www.teachertechnologies.com/interactive-whiteboards/what-are-interactive-whiteboards-some-advice/
The Smart Board software is well designed and ahows signs that someone may have tried to make it easy to use. The install takes a long time, as it installs 'galleries', video clips and pictures, just like clip art, for all subjects, which the teacher can access and include in their presentation. The Smart Board software is good because when in presentation mode, everything is movable and clickable, meaning that if you want to say give emphasis to a particular piece of text, you can touch and then drag the corner of the text box to enlarge it.
I personally think they are 'worth it' if you use it well. We use it to bring up video clips, display interactive games such as science quizes (I work in the Science Department), or display questions on the board with the answers available by tapping the question.
Our's are front projection, but it only takes a small amount of time to adjust.
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M$Honestly, I don't think it's all that. I still end up using my hand-held presentation remote, because I'm not one to stand at the board and lecture. The interface is still a little clunky, too. There can be a definite gap between touching the pen to the board and when it starts writing, and it also doesn't align as well as I'd like.
Also, I keep forgetting that when I touch the board, the slide changes. Hard habit to break.
To give you a point of reference, I'm generally considered pretty tech-savvy by both my peers and students, so I don't think it's me as much as the board.
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M$They should be cautiously bought and installed. In my classroom I actually needed to have screens placed over the skylights for the content to be visible in the afternoon sun. I had to wait for two years for the custodian to find room in the budget for this necessity.
I don't have any experience with those stand alone (no project needed) solutions, but I understand that SmartBoard does have them. From the outset a few benefits would be that there is (I expect) no need to orient or reorient them.
As a classroom teacher my experience has been that there is a constant need to reorient the board otherwise touching the board produces the wrong result.
It can be a very useful tool in the classroom (and I'm sure out) but content has to be greater than the gimmick of the technology. If it isn't slick and seamless it doesn't add to the presentation of material.
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M$
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M$They are incredibly useful when one is in a tech company. UI/UX redesign? Put screen shots up and make many iterations with external markup and then share with many people. Network diagrams and schematics, and system architecture are great as well.
Helped out on a large network redesign recently and the Smart Board made everything so much more seamless when we had to share work product with a geo distributed team. We were bringing up terminal windows to verify topology and hostnames, checking traceroutes, etc.
I loved it so much I am planning on buying one for my small consulting company. Doing research right now to see what is going to work best for us.
One of the best items is never having to write "DO NOT ERASE" up on the board only to find out that it is gone the next day =)
Personal experience
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M$
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M$
I'm not sure what brand we use, IT set it up.
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M$To directly answer your questions:
1. For the right application, yes. If you're a math teacher used to scribbling on the board, and with no need to project things often, then no. If you're a language instructor always needing to get pages of text on a wall, with the desire to highlight, write, and move things just as easily as on your personal computer, absolutely!
2. We used it in a classroom environment, to allow the instructors to project pages from our books on the boards easily. They could write over everything easily, and we could have interactive activities that made the learning environment much more enjoyable.
3. I don't remember model numbers, but they were SMART boards, for sure.
As a side note, I remember in an English calls of mine back in grade school, we had an early SMART board. We never used it. It was a giant waste of money. Completely different from my experience with them in the military.
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M$Benefits:
1. IF teachers do not know how to use them well, they can use it just as a projection screen. Even though this is not efficient, it is easier then setting up a projector every time you want to look up something on the Internet or show a graphic or movie clip.
2. If teachers are trained, there are many applications for science and math that make the lessons more interesting and multimodal.
3. You can download other teachers' lessons, which can add new ideas to your own lessons.
4. You can make your own lessons, save them and use them in the future.
5. You can email what you have written on the board to students who are absent.
6. Students enjoy them and love to use them.
Negatives:
1. They don't always work well and sometimes have to be restarted. Even then, out of 12 Smart Boards, 3 are currently not working well.
2. If you have the company install them, plan on adding 1200 dollars a piece for installation.
3. If you install them yourself (we did) and there is a problem, they charge 1200 to come fix it. 1 of the 3 we are having a problem with was installed by the company (we had one installed just to see how it is done).
4 It involves training, which is $850 for a few hours. If teachers don't use them right away, they forget how to use it at a higher level and need additional training.
Overall conclusion: Worth it, may want to also have a regular marker board in case it does not work. For higher level use, get the teacher's trained well and then have them work with the other teachers.
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M$
http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
I've been around and see 3 models, and I like the wii project idea better than all the rest.
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M$You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$I recommend you look at http://www.edistorm.com/ Let's you brainstorm on an online whiteboard. Unlimited simultaneous users in multiple locations via laptop, iPhone and iPad in beta. Great for brainstorming before, during and after meetings.
Disclosure, I'm the founder.
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M$The majority of the hardware I've installed and used are the standard front projection boards. I have also had the opportunity to use some of the frames that go around "standard" flat panel and rear projection displays, and add the same functionality to those displays.
I've also integrated the boards and associated computers into Tandberg videoconferencing setups. Being able to share such visual content across distances is very impressive.
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M$
As it happens I just saw a new product in this genre at a demo today -
The Epson BrightLink 450Wi Interactive Projector.
This is a super short throw projector (it mounts on the wall above the whiteboard - so shadows are really not a problem)
the cool thing is that the interactive white board functionality is built into the projector and the special pen it comes with. Very impressive - seems to work great and be one of the least expensive options available.
Details at: http://www.epsonbrightlink.webengager.com/