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"Smart Board" To Replace White Boards?
ZiZ writes "The BBC has released a story reporting a growing level of interest in Smart Board technology - particularly due to the efforts of Virtual-Ink's Mimio and variants thereof. Mimio gathers the information written on a whiteboard by virtue of "infared and ultrasonic receivers", stores it in a mobile base station, and allows for later downloading to a computer; it also has the ability to interface with a presentation, browser, or whatnot, in a mode they call mimioMouse, to allow cheap, interactive, real-time smartboards.This looks like it could be the high-tech breakthrough schools everywhere, not just in the UK, have been waiting for - or at least the beginning...and at a mere $400 or so, it's almost affordable enough to justify one in the home, too!"
That's just great - we finally replaced our greenboard with a blackboard yesterday and here comes electronic whiteboards! Those redboards and blueboards must have snuck right by us. Talk about a paradigm shift...
Go Kart Parts - Got to love driving with the ground an in
It's oldskewl kewl!
I work as a tech in a UK school where we've already got a couple of "interactive whiteboards", looking at getting a lot more (we're talking every classroom).
They're not really as much fun in the toy sense as you'd imagine, but they're really reliable in my experience, so they keep me happy.
The thing to keep in mind is that you're going to need your £x000 projector to go with it if you want to use it like a massive touchscreen.
I saw it in a furniture catalog a few month ago, and it remind me of some system from a few years ago, where you write on a paperboard, and when you have finished the drawing, paper roll under a scanner system, and can be printed or faxed.
My university recently purchased a few of these to incorporate into a new Technical Communications course. The smart board was by far smarter than the teacher, but that's beside the point.
The boards were intuitive, responsive, and just plain fun to use. Paired with projectors built into the ceiling and interfaced with the terminal by the smartboards, we had quite the multimedia setup for our course. Special markers also added to the fun by allowing the prof to use different colors to 'overwrite' images on the computer that were projected onto the smartboard. Very very cool, and it never crashed or locked once, which I think is fantastic for such an input-sensitive windows system.
I hope to see more schools and universitites employ this technology, as it has a far greater and instant impact in the classroom than grants for new computers a school doesn't have the money to purchase licenses for.
Bet the teacher would get mad if you wrote on one of those with a Marks-A-Lot!
As mentioned one of those "variants" is ebeam. It supports infrared, netmeeting, no-PC, Mac. Its smaller and works with larger boards.
http://ebeam.efi.com/
Non illegemati carborundum est!
Am I missing something? It says it can "project the internet"... it also says for dvd and vhs. The packages for sale (couple of hundred quid) certainly don't include video projectors.
How does this work?
This page is in Japanese, but you get the idea.. we had one of these at an old company. Basically it's a big whiteboard with the writing surfaces on rollers that can pass by a scanning element, which prints it out. It was called a "boardfax" or somesuch. Granted, this one sounds neater :)
I beleive this kind of technology is good mostly for teleconference. When one make a presentation and draw on top of it, it's nice to have this sent to the other site.
Better, if it can record not only the result, but the actual act of drawing, the presentation can be played back just like the speaker presented the stuff.
If the only use you have is to digitalise a board, 1.3M Pixel digital camera (turn off the flash) will give you more than you ask for... No need for special casing for your pencils and eraser, very portable, can be used on any "legacy" board, can be used after you started drawing (unlike most cheap digital board were you need to start drawing with the special pencils casing, you cannot digitalize something that was started with legacy tools).
stores it in a mobile base station, and allows for later downloading to a computer;
Wait, add a wireless network, make the plastic frame an antenna, and you don't even need the "mobile base station"!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Our group has been using a Mimio device for the last few months. We've used it when discussing issues. We don't have to take notes documenting our meeting discussion. They are saved automatically and available in color to distribute. Usually we just archive them.
The Mimio capture device used to fall down after a couple of days until we attached the semi-permanent mounting clips to the whiteboard.
We've been very pleased with our Mimio and it would suck to not have it after being used to it.
I haven't played with the MimioMouse functionality. That seems better for more organized presentations and training.
I knew a guy who got fired for having the about:mozilla quote written on his whiteboard. Girl who wrote it got fired too. Those things are hazardous!
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Not counting that Mimeomouse, the regular Mimeo product was pretty bad, at least a couple of years ago...you put the marker in a special holder, all well and good, but the mark only registers if you're pressing really firmly...it was way too easy to miss many lines, so we never could count on it as a reliable tool.
What I really want to see are big honkin' LCD flatpanel touchpanel white boards. (and the same technology for laptops while we're at it.) If it would make it cheaper, I don't the resolution would have to be all that great, just have great big pixels at 1280x960 or whatever.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
But I'm be embarrassed to have people see my bad penmanship and spelling in presentations... But I could justify one for the fridge at home, to jot down what I need from the store and then maybe email it to Safeway to pick up later...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The downsides to it are that, left unchecked, the suction cups will pull off the wall and the whole business crashes to the floor. We've had to post a note for people to remove it from the board when they are finished so it won't get broken on the floor when it falls.
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
We have one of the Mimio's in our class and I'm not too impressed by it.
:-)
It's fine for just advancing a slide in a presentation, but for clicking it's kinda cumbersome. Best analogy I can think of is the touchpads on laptop, the tap and wait or double tap is too slwo for my tastes.
What does work well for us is a nice LCD display for the presenter to use in conjuction with the projected image and a wireless mouse.
Finally, we had to get new marker boards which were very expensive (the regular dry erase boards glare pretty badly.) The new one's do the trick with little glare but they were at least a couple grand.
Here's hoping soon I won't have to leave my dorm and go to those darn classrooms, today is the start of spring break for us anyway though
We've used smartboards in some systems at work. Basically it's just a digital whiteboard. The image is shown using a projector. Whenever one of the pens is picked up, the software on the computer detects it and freezes the image. You can then draw on the board, and lines are shown. It's of course possible to save the image. The problem is that you have to stand in front of the board, blocking the image. It comes with 4 "pens" (with different colors) and an eraser. The board is just touch sensitive. By detecting which pen (or eraser) the user picks up it uses the correct color (there is one place for each pen, if you put the green pen in the blue tray and vice versa a blue color will be used even if you pick up the green pen.
The software we used was for windows, but the web page says that some of the features are available for Mac and UNIX/Linux too.
Oops, wrong story.
Not a lot of places sell slate blackboards or greenboards any more simply because they last decades and whiteboards are significantly cheaper to produce.
That said, a large blackboard costs about 200 dollars. $400 for blackboard plus transmission hardware is really not that bad.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The computer science department at Georgia Tech has had something similar for a couple of years now. Their eclass program, (with this class as an example) would allow the professor to write onto a large screen with an electronic marker. This writing would then be both projected on the screen as well as captured for later review. The room was also set up for audio and video captures. It worked very well, leading me to believe that this will soon become mainstream.
We've had a smart board for two years.
Here's a nice thing you can do with it:
Take the red "marker" away from the holder.
[it automatically changes color to red]
Draw your fingers across the board [looks pretty much like blood on the board!!!] Freddy's back!!!
Of course you can also emulate mouse movements with your hand. I've done some great hand waving with it.
Probably everybody knows about this one, but we use a digital camera to capture important whiteboarding sessions. Maybe not as much fun as one of these nifty Mimio's, but it works fine for us.
-Thomas
I for one missed a lot of class time in college, "I wouldn't say I was missing it bob!". It would of been really cool if I could just download a copy of the days presentation + notes from the whiteboard. That way I wouldn't of felt so bad for drinking so much the night before. Now if the whiteboard would also record sound ... I would of never gone to class!
The bad part about these smartboards, I believe, can be completely solved with next version smartboards.
Even in the most text-heavy discussions, it takes only about 2-4 minutes per page to type up what was written, and the graphics are clear because they're not moved anywhere.
Sure, it's not netmeetingable, and you can't get a nice little graphics file out of it, but how often do you really need that anyway?
Besides, usually what comes out of those meetings are either very rough screen prototypes, or to-do items that have to get put into a project plan and retyped anyway.
The other beautiful thing about paper is the built-in revision control. Crossing out items and using multi-color pens makes it simple.
I've used SmartTech's SmartBoard regularly over the past few years. Here's my impressions:
There is a bit of a learning curve; it's not a huge one, but enough that unless someone makes a small bit of an effort, they never will use the technology.
*However*, once you put the time in to know how to effectively use it, it is an amazing technology.
Being able to flip to a new page with a tape on the board, and flip back and forth between pages is huge. Also, in cases where you need *just* a little more room but don't have it, you can select the whole area, and reduce it in size a bit, and draw the stuff you wanted to add. Extremely handy. It's cases like these that it *saves* you a lot of time.
Being able to have a full web/printable transcript of a session is also a huge timesaver.
SmartTech's software also has features for timing agenda's, assigning task responsibilities, and other very neat conferencing features. (Also supports remote whiteboarding, good for those videoconferences).
I've always wanted to try Mimeo's unit to compare, but never had the time. Hardly new technology, but definitely very useful.
The biggest problem is that in order to make best use of these types of units, you also need an LCD projector, which makes the cost of the SmartBoard/Mimeo unit look pretty small.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This idea has been around the block dozens of times over the last ten years, and never hit it big. There's one in the next room that has lain dormant since before I started working here. Fax machines have well-established standards and interoperate across manufacturers, and everybody already owns one. Their faults are that the drawings aren't machine-readable, and the interactivity isn't there. But I don't think that's enough difference to make a market, especially where others have already tried and failed.
Innovation is a lovely thing, but Sun-tse would tell these guys not to go into a battle they aren't likely to win. Maybe the right way to tackle this is a pen- or stylus-input gadget for existing Java whiteboards that can sell for much less, and possibly some standardization of a Java whiteboard protocol, with a reference implementation.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
well partially anyways. Panasonic used to have a whiteboard that would capture whatever you wrote on it and save that to a computer. had a built in 'computer' for standalone operation. you could then make printed copies etc... freeing you from having to take notes. this was back in '95ish... Sorry, no links.. saw it in a brochure.
This ad doesn't bother me at all.
I had a sig, but
my guess is you'll be needing to budget a lot of spare parts for your computers, manly CPU and power supply fans, which will not enjoy being submerged in chalk dust. That's assuming you don't mind about hygiene because if you do, you'll also need to think about maintenance for your computers.
Anybody care to guess why the Mac version is $90 more ($497) than the Windows version ($407)? The only difference in the spec I can see is a 16-foot USB cable for the Mac version instead of a 10-foot serial cable.
Look neat, but they can forget my business until/unless they either answer that question (well) or make the prices the same. We (mac users) are all tired of this crap.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I just take a picture of my white board with a digital camera. It's simple, cheap, and it uses stuff I already have sitting around in my office.
I used a 'smartboard' when I was helping out with some extra IT teaching at a school (Birmingham, UK). They are really nice to use - you can do all sorts of things with them that would be impossible with pens-and-whiteboard.
They do take a bit of getting used to - if you think of them as (a) a big computer screen or (b) an electronic whiteboard, you don't get the full benefits from them. The big leap is to start using both aspects - running computer software and then drawing on it with the pens (when you pick up one of the special pens, the software knows which one you have and your scribbles are coloured appropriately)
A friend of mine is training to be a maths teacher and he is using smart boards on a day-to-day basis - apparently they are being brought in all over schools. He says they lend a new dimension to maths teaching - allowing software to bring concepts to life. One example he mentioned was transformations. He can get kids to draw shapes on the screen, guess how they would look when rotated, translated or scaled and then have the software animate the transformation to compare the result to their predictions.
A function to create the sound of chalk scraping, to wake sleeping undergrads?
:)
I'd not want to give that up if I was a lecturer.
I've found that the best application of the smartboards at work is that on occasion I can amuse myself by playing big-screen solitaire :)
Smart Boards not all they are cracked up to be. They are inaccurate, very crude, and uncomfortable to work with. Aside from blocking the projector all the time... It's just another silly case of "we must make this digital so that it's 'cool'" phenomenon.
But aside from that, they are just plain and simple a Bad Idea. The whole point of a chalk board or a white board, or even a scratch pad, is that you have freedom in your sketches. You are expressing ideas or at least trying to develop those ideas. The moment that you have to try to conform your ideas into some sort of restriction from the paradigm of your media, you lose pieces of your idea. Example: lines on paper, text only for jotting ideas on your Palm Pilot, etc.
Enter the Smart Board. Regardless of the resolution, you're still dealing with pixels (probably pretty low res for the size of the surface versus the resolution of the projector). You're conforming what you want to express to a grid. Now while that may not seem like such a big idea, how often have you found that you write in tiny little details or hash marks or some other marking on a diagram? Sometimes those are very useful. What if you tried to draw a couple parallel hash marks and found that the resolution of the white board was insufficient to draw them... and made one thick line.
It's little nuances like this that make Smart Boards utterly useless. You have to be as freeform as possible when expressing ideas! You should set the guide lines... and not your canvas.
Why bother.
I've been thinking of buying one of these forever, but I need it to work with Linux. I do all of my development under Linux, and my workstation at work runs it. It would be incredibly nice to save whiteboard doodles. I have used a digital camera for this in the past, but something like Mimio would be great.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
My high school is using them and they are actually very helpful. One thing that my calculus teacher does is he writes down the steps we went throught to solve problems and then saves the slide so he will be able to look back on it later. It was very creative for someone like himself. We were quasi-proud...
My other sig is an import.
If it doesn't have basis self-preservation instincts that will allow it to elude the middle-managers, who invariably will try to write on it with a PERMANENT MARKER, then it really isn't 'smart', just 'expensive'..
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Doh, nevermind... ;)
Finally!
:)
For all those lazy Tuesday morning math lessons at the university I had wondered, why anyone hasn't come up with an idea like this.. Record the lecturers boring nasal sound, record his cryptic writings from the chalkboard, sync'em, bag'em and put'em in a website for the lazy ass students like myself!
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
at the college I attend. The networking teacher uses it to project handy dandy Powerpoint Presentations on it. Is there any software for Linux that interfaces with it? Everyone is so caught up with Microsoft at that school, that they don't even know what Open Source means.
I can see where they can have their advantages though. Mainly the fact that they don't use ink to write on. This has become a problem in most classes, especially Calculus class where you can't read what is on the board because the marker doesn't write.
However, for that same reason, I'd have to say that I do not like these Smartboards. They're method of writing is similiar to a PDA, which is difficult to line up stuff that has already been written. This would not be good for a math class.
A couple teachers have SmartBoards and dry erase marker boards in their classes. One of my teacher had been writing on the marker board so he still had the marker in his hand. He walked up to the SmartBoard and commenced to writing on it. He scared himself very badly and hurridly erased it. He was quite happy that it erased all the way. Later, I let him know that it could also be a marker board.
Another thing he likes to do is pick up the eraser, and then use his index finger to try and erase small portions of something he's written. Hmm...doesn't seem to make it more precise. He also likes to lose the pens in his pocket, and even his hand on occassions. Good for a laugh or two most days.
My other sig is an import.
This is better than a video camera pointed at the screen how?
I run the website for a somewhat large school district and have had some experience with Mimio. The way it saves the files is somewhat half-logical, but it works well with Real Servers (with which I have no experience) and regular webservers. The archive version of the files works great for dispensing, with a small modification of the smil file referencing the audio and video portions of the presentation.
/. link, but the school district is in Rockford, Michigan and the teacher's page is listed under East middle school.
As of right now the single teacher with the Mimio hardware has about 28 math lessons online. The teacher is now uploading her lessons almost daily, and it looks like everything is working out quite well. For an eleven minute presentation the audio takes up about 1.4 megs while the video takes up only 42k.
Overall this seems like a great system. Looking at the video files, almost every stroke the teacher makes on the whiteboard shows up. I'd love if all of my teachers put their lectures online with this.
Our connection probably can't handle a direct
... that's all i wrote...
Isn't it as smart as the person who is writing on it? :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Beige is my favorite now. Goes well with the universe.
Yeah, we have one of those at my old highschool in the mathlab. They got it after I left, so I was dissapointed to say the least. Oh well. When I have stopped by, they were using it, and it seemed like a pretty cool thing. hm.. yeah.
The college in my town had a fire in their main building a couple of years ago. One thing they did when they rebuilt was put smart-boards in EVERY classroom. I've heard nothing but rave reviews. Especially from the students who can get the notes back in their dorm room over the college intranet. Funny that this is just now getting around to /. though.
We have a classroom environment in which we have 6 of these SmartBoards. They're so so, we really haven't put them to a lot of use. They work great, when properly configured. But, even when configured, the boundary lines usually go astray after awhile.
... except it's hard, for an instructor, to have the steps in his mind of: pick up the black pen, write, put the pen back into the black slot, pick up the blue pen, write ... etc. You have the urge write in black, then write in blue, then back in black, without putting the pens back in their respective slots, and that makes everything funny :)
For example, we have the smart board in the center of the class, flanking it are two very large projector screens on the wall. They're two different sizes, so the image on the smart board is magnified to fit the projection. Well, the problem is that when you start drawing a box on the Smartboard, it'll fit on the smart board, but will start going outside the scope of the projection. A 2"x2" box appears 12"x12" on the smart board sometimes, sometimes it's smaller, it goes all over the place.
A straight line isn't always a straight line. A straight line drawn on the Smartboard will end up looking like a line at a 15* slope on the projection, so the whole image/text is askew.
And the eraser? Well, it works so-so. it doesn't always erase what's on the 'clipboard'. You can erase all the ink, but you constantly have to step back to look at the projection to see if there's still stuff in memory that wasn't erased, then feel around the board to try and erase it all.
Other than that, it works great
Just my experience...
We have two SmartBoards at my College's MathLAN I have never once seen them used, except when my prof brought his kid to class who had great fun playing with the special eraser. It's still missing.
josh
I hope they incorporate First Post technology into these boards. And some professors I know could use a lameness filter.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
... and they've barely been used. Various problems with them (like the spot you touch on the board not properly lining up with the spot you see on a projection or a lost vitual marker). They sounded cool, but in the end I think they probably will suck their way out of the market.
Instead of buying clips, try sticking the suction cups to the board with clear silicone RTV sealant. It will still peel off, but only when you want it to (it takes considerable effort).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
"it's almost affordable enough to justify one in the home, too!"
Don't laugh too hard.. there is a couple of math/comp sci professors at my university to live together and have a blackboard in their bedroom.
ok.. maybe you should laugh... taking derivatives is NOT foreplay.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The tiny college (Bryan College, www.bryan.edu) in Eastern Tennessee that I graduated from has them in every classroom. The boards are great b/c you aren't distracted by having to copy the professor's notes off of the whiteboard, you can just download them after class. It's good to see the rest of the world catching up with rural Tennessee.
One of the neat things about the mimio is that you can attach it to existing white boards with suction cups. The $500 version has it's own memory so you don't have to hook it up to a computer while you are using it to capture drawings (just to download).
science is a religion
While I don't necessarily support your claim about the cost of mac software, the mac version is different. My office has been using Mimios (both the pc and mac(usb) version) for over a year now. They work great and are effortless to set up.
The mac software even lets you export to iMovie.
-= alphaFlight =-
A friends school, The William Penn Charter School is building a new middle school and putting a SmartBoard in each classroom. They already have about 9 in other teaching areas around their campus.Thier teachers seem very pleased with thier reliability and usefullness in the classroom.
what experiences have you all had?
heybiff
Even the Sun goes down.
science is a religion
First I couldn't inhale the chalk dust while clapping erasers, now I can't even sniff the markers?
... these aren't that new are they. I saw and used such a device back in the late '80s for a remote conference. The new one probably has some new bells and whistles but it's not so innovative (IMHO). Now if I scrape my fingernails across it... does it record a grating, screechy sound and transmit it to others for listening on their PC? Now that would be fun.
Personally, I hope this doesn't spell the end of chalk. It doesn't dry out like those damned whiteboard markers.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Smart Boards not all they are cracked up to be. They are inaccurate, very crude, and uncomfortable to work with. Aside from blocking the projector all the time...
Haven't used one recently, have you?
First, you don't have to block the board. The ones we use are rear projection so they just look like a big TV set. You can also get overlays for plasma TV screens- neither have this problem.
Now while that may not seem like such a big idea, how often have you found that you write in tiny little details or hash marks or some other marking on a diagram? Sometimes those are very useful.
If you're writing so small that a 1024x768 screen can't pick it up, nobody in your audience can either. These aren't designed to be used alone: they're for people to use in classrooms/teleconferences. Put a single black pixel up and step back 10 feet- you won't see it. You need an area of at least 6-10 pixels.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
These things are great. We have a few at the school I work for and there is only one problem that I see with them and that is that they don't get used enough. This seems to be true of the school I work at as well as others in our school district. Many, not all, teachers simply refuse to use the technology available. It is the same thing with our airport computer lab (15 ibooks in a cart for checkout). Until teachers start using the technology being developed on a regular basis I don't think they will have that big of an impact on schools.
Note: This is not taking anything away from the these boards. They are really cool IMHO.
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." - Pla
We have had one for about 2 years in my research building and we used it about 2 or 3 times. The thing is that for teaching classes, if a professor scribbles something on the board, usually the students like to make their own notes anyway.
For meetings, even if you save all this info, nobody ever looks at it again anyway - people like to make their own info.
IMHO, this will take off, when everyone in the class/meeting has a laptop, and the board beams the info to all the people, so that it appears on their screen and they can add their notes and diagrams to it. That would be like taking notes but without having to redraw, rewrite whats on the board.
I would imagine it's to cover the costs of development when selling to a much smaller audience (the majority of universities and businesses use windows or linux systems). Less will be sold, so more per unit has to be made.
If you need to interpret my post, then you don't get it.
It's just another silly case of "we must make this digital so that it's 'cool'"
My competition suffers from this:
During the competitive bid process that I must endure to get new clients - I do much better that the powerpoint-idiot-competition by speaking clearly, answering questions intelignently and handing out written documentation *after* my presentation. It's important to hand documentation out after, as it keeps poepels atention focued on you and your message.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Ze review, she is here: http://www.dansdata.com/mimio.htm.
But aside from that, they are just plain and simple a Bad Idea. [...] Regardless of the resolution, you're still dealing with pixels...
I must take issue with you there... I think the idea is sound; poor resolution merely points to a bad implementation, or insufficient technology to properly realize the Good Idea.
I don't know what other objections you have, but it seems to me that the possible advantages make it a no-brainer with regards to whether the basic concept is sound. Digitizing the whiteboard can give you so many abilities:
I think the list can go on and on.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
It could be the mac version uses a USB connection and the PC is using Serial?
I've been using smartboards for about five years now, and I've only found their functionality truly useful on a handful of occassions. The problem is one of context; what appears on a whiteboard is a dynamic process that turns out to make very little sense when snapshotted and brought up at a later date as a series of static images.
Eventually, I stopped checking the smartboards out of storage for our design markups, and instead made sure that we had someone in the meetings to act as a secretary, transcriber, and note-taker (which is what older hands always suggested I do in the first place).
-Baka!
The primary problem I have found is not their resolution, but that they are small. You can line a wall with whiteboards, but the footprint of smart boards forces them in a corner (and this should be true for the forseeable future). It certainly is not economical to line the wall with them.
With paging, you would think this is not a problem. And this is true if your class is taught lecture style. However, I am currently teaching a Moore method mathematics class in a room with a smart board. I don't present; the students go up to the board and work things out on their own - with comments from me and the class. Because students build on each other's results, it is important that I leave everything up that has been done for the day and not erase it. Paging is not sufficient, as the typical student will keep flipping throught the pages (ever see what a student does to their notes when you ask them a question?) and not think. So I have abandoned the smart board and moved back to white boards.
The primary problem with Smart boards is that they are small.Sure the tech is cool and the potential is huge, but that makes no difference when the professors don't know how to use them!
For some strange reason UNC purchased a few smartboards but apparently neglected to teach its professors what they were, what they could do, and how to do it. I have had no less than four classes in one of the new smartboard rooms (which are also fully equiped with a dvd player, a vcr, a five speaker multimedia setup, a laptop (for the smartboard software and the web), and cable tv - all tied into a nifty touch screen interface on the podium and ALL un-used except for the vcr sometimes. All of the professors use it like a regular whiteboard, even to the point of projecting outlines onto the screen and then highlighting them with a regular dry erase marker.
I've used the smartboards at a campus technology demo, and I think they could be a fantastic resource, but they are currently going nowhere.
The good old chalkboard was the one shown in use? Seems like they should have shown people using the new system too.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Haven't used one recently, have you?
:)
Just the other day.
First, you don't have to block the board. The ones we use are rear projection so they just look like a big TV set. You can also get overlays for plasma TV screens- neither have this problem.
OKay, it's rear projection or plasma... got it. My original point still stands. Besides, it doesn't make any sense to pay $2000-$8000 for a white board that is no more effective than a... white board.
If you're writing so small that a 1024x768 screen can't pick it up, nobody in your audience can either. These aren't designed to be used alone: they're for people to use in classrooms/teleconferences. Put a single black pixel up and step back 10 feet- you won't see it. You need an area of at least 6-10 pixels.
I am not talking about an audience necessarily. I am talking about interacting closely with peers and coworkers. And I am not talking about writing small. I am talking about writing detailed. You can also put a single black pixel on a 640x480 computer display, and you'll not really see it to clearly. But would you say 640x480 is sufficient resolution for sketching?
By the way, for about $200-$500, you can have an effective resolution on a white board of millions of dpi (think molecules). Now try to buy a Smart Board of similar size that has 1000dpi resolution.
Why bother.
For anybody that uses a digital camera to take snaps of your whiteboards I heartily reccomend a piece of software called (imaginatively enough) "Whiteboard Photo". This specialized piece of software massages your snaps such that the print you get is perspective corrected and the background is cleaned up. When you download your snaps from the camera you can either batch process the photos or you can handle them individually. If you handle them individually you can define the area of the board a bit better - the software usually does a good job of recognizing the corners of the whiteboard but sometimes you need to reposition the corners (which is a simple click-drag). Overall it does a pretty impressive job and is easily worth the money and now no unlucky person has to be picked to frantically try to trascribe the boards manually.
One of our conference rooms always seems to end up with the old dried up markers - the ones that are hard to read even when you're sitting right in front of the board - the software even does a pretty good job converting those into usable prints.
We also use it to take snaps of flip charts with equally good results.
Here's a site that has a review.It costs $100 US direct from the Pixid web site and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. We bought our copy thru an online vendor (whose name escapes me at the moment) for $79 US but a search should turn up other vendors.
P.S. - one word above was intentionally misspelled to give the anal-retentives among us something to whine about.
'The moment that you have to try to conform your ideas into some sort of restriction from the paradigm of your media, you lose pieces of your idea.' Hang on....A white board is in itself a medium (so is paper, etc), so by expressing your ideas on any medium _including_ standard whiteboards you lose pieces of your idea. If anything these new systems have less contraints! /b
[Please type your sig here.]
Until idiot instructors start using them as ordinary white boards. Lemmetellya, cleaning dry-erase marks off of a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment is not fun, and one of the many reasons I got out of classroom lab support (well, that, and I graduated from university).
dinner: it's what's for beer
The mac version comes with a USB adapter because the mac doesn't support serial and with newer rev 2.0 pens which are very nice.
You're tired of all the crap? Then don't use Apple products.
Everyone knows that Apple subscribes to "Price Gougers Anonymous"...if you price-spec out system setups (like a G4, or a Powerbook, or any other system they produce), you quickly come to realize that Apple usually sticks on a nice 30% price increase to everything they produce.
And for the love of God - don't even THINK about going through CompUSA - you'll spend another 10%-25% on top of that.
Come on man, don't start bitching about how you're sick of "expensive Apple hardware/software". It's expensive for a reason - because Apple wants it to be.
-Zero
E-Mail; remove NOSPAM for yummy goodness!
The only problem we've had with mimio boards is that when you erase stuff on the screen, it doesn't erase the marker off the board. This works the other way around. I don't see why I can't edit my white board over the network. They've got a way to go, IMHO.
-jj-
Modal behavior is a bad idea when it comes to user interface design. See Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (pun intended). There are many ways the write/erase system could have been made non-modal. I don't think you should laugh at people who can't figure out bad designs.
I plan on inviting Alan Thicke over to my house just so we can play Win, Lose or Draw over the internet!
This company has been making smart white boards for several years now, and I've seen them used in a number of local (Calgary) businesses and post-secondary schools. A friend of mine used to work for this company (run in part by an HCI researcher) designing the software bits.
I've seen three different styles of magic white boards. Some that have sensors in the tips of the markers, some like mimeo which use some sort of wireless communication, and others that pass a scanner over the board. In every situation that I've seen them in (graduate school, government research facility, private company) they were all useless beyond the ghee-whiz factor. I can imagine some use in collaboration, but aside from that white boards wind up as big scratch pads for ideas. They get the work rolling, but generally aren't the work.
The middle mind speaks!
Are we talking about the same thing here?
I'm not aware of a rising clamor for really cool high-tech whiteboards in schools.
But I keep seeing and hearing about outnumbered and underqualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms, dumbed-down curricula, violence, racial conflict, patronage, corruption, drug addiction, excessive review time for high-stakes testing, poor morale, and low expectations.
Which one of those problems is the space-age whiteboard supposed to solve?
Sure, it's a neat idea and probably pretty useful, but a "breakthrough" that schools have been waiting for? Insert obligatory derogatory comparison to Microsoft marketing!
I am a lab technician at the university I attend. I am in charge of a few computer classrooms. In two of my labs we use smartboards. In my lab for education majors we have one hooked up to a PC. This then goes to a color projector, which projects to the smartboard. It is a really usefully teaching tool, that hopefully the education majors leave with a good technology background from using it. We also have a VCR, DVD player, document camera, and a MAC all hooked up to it. The students can do just about anything they want with it. I hope that very soon this technology is readily available in highschools. It would be a great advance for technology.
P.S. By the way, I instruct the students how to set up all of these componts, and it is a required class for all education majors. So hopefully every school won't require a tech for all of this tech.
Change the size of already-drawn elements
Just this feature alone will probably get a LOT of companies/schools/etc... to buy one. The ability to point at something you wrote a few minutes ago and have it enlarge itself is just invaluable. Especially in a room filled with people who may not be able to see clearly from the back.
Additionally I'd love to see someone rig their smartboard to dump the output to a website somehow, so you could sit in on lectures without having to deal with vid-conf software, just a sound pickup and a smartboard dump. Should be MUCH lower bandwidth than trying to do any kind of readable video.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
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At the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, we have Smart Boards in every classroom. They are incredibly useful, as they display the source computer's screen, function as a touch screen (great for PowerPoint presentations, you just touch the screen to progress), and allow you to write with electronic "markers" (like the sports announcers) and an electronic "eraser". You can also write on them with regular dry erase markers, since they function as regular white boards as well. They are wonderful, and the rest of the University of Arkansas is about to follow suit by putting them in the other colleges...
These have been around for years. Why is this news? It may of course be news to the BBC, but at the shop I used to work at we had a very similar device that we used in meetings. Two years ago.
I used the mimio system last year at university.
It's all very impressive, especially the eraser, which gets onlookers pretty amazed.
Very useful for seminars/lectures where some people are participating remotely. Also, its ability to save a whiteboarding session as an mpeg is cool.
The pens are really expensive. I suppose this is to be expected for a system that works this well.
Also, the calibration process is a bit of a drag, as we had to do it everytime we started it up.
However, the point is that they are much cheaper now, while packing in more features to boot :) Plus, when you look at the growing support, you see how perhaps not only will this technology experience a burst of use and popularity, but from that we could see variations and innovation (not the MS def.) on this due to said mass use.
Try walking through life trying to be less egotistical and confrontational. if you want a medal for knowing this information is old, and a V for having used it before, then give me your address and I will deliver it. You can boast of your technological prowess when wearing it and be as empty as the suits that will lust over this simply because of its impending buzz loaded explanation.
We've been using mimio at DePaul University for a little over a year now, and everything goes OK as long as the prof is paying attention to what is being recorded, and the equipment is working well. The Professor has to be pretty well trained in order to make sure all of the material makes it into the recorder. It's still kind of tricky, but I think it's a great idea, and will only improve as people get used to it more.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Mimeo system uses infrared to communicate the pen and eraser motion back to the computer. If you have a motion detector system in your building, the detectors will broadcast IR and completely destroy your Mimeo communication.
Does the sqeal sound the same way as chalk on a slightly wet blackboard? ;-)
OKay, it's rear projection or plasma... got it. My original point still stands
No, it doesn't. You don't block the projector: sure, you can stand in front of the board and block the view, but that's not any different than any other kind of black/whiteboard.
By the way, for about $200-$500, you can have an effective resolution on a white board of millions of dpi (think molecules).
Actually, it's nowhere close to that: whiteboard markers are fat and unwieldy for the most part.
I don't think you really see the benefits of one of these systems. Can you do any of the following on a whiteboard?
Hint: these aren't just for sketching on a wall. They've got capabilities far beyond that of a standard whiteboard. If you want to sketch on a wall, use a whiteboard. We've got them in the classrooms too, you know.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
My college (senior high school, not university for you American types :) ) has plenty of smartboards dotted around the place (although, curiously, not in any *science labs*. Answers on a postcard for that one!)
They sound like a very good idea. In practice, they don't really work at all. The reason? Powerpoint-poisoning. It simply sends...you...to...sleeeeeppppppppppppp. It's not just the dreaded PP that does this though, it's everything displayed on the screen. If pictures are brought up, they are invariably too complicated to take down, so the teacher has to manually draw out the picture anyway. It also encourages huge word documents to be displayed, so instead of boiling down the topic to the bare essentials for note-taking, big red circles are drawn all over it. All this is very sleep-inducing indeed. There is something about the teacher not making squeaks on the whiteboard that seems to make it all very...passive.
Geez, this technology has been around for, what, fifteen years now? Has NO ONE ever seen whiteboards which automatically download drawn information to computers? This kind of thing has been standard in hi-tech conference rooms for almost two decades.
These gadgets are initially attractive, but basically suck. Everywhere I've seen them installed, they go unused. First there are the inherent problems: the pen holders are large and awkward, the markers always seem to dry out due to poor engineering of the pen cap, the tiny expensive batteries wear out (and whose job is it to replenish them?), the pen holders are usually made of dark plastic that camouflages the fact that they are covered in ink - people learn not to touch them. The special eraser is undersized and rapidly becomes choked with ink.
Then there are the self-made problems. I worked for a VBC that wanted to install these gadgets in our conference rooms. However we didn't like the PC-centric approach which makes it a hassle to set up for each meeting with someone's personal laptop. We wanted to simply put the equipment on the network. Since the gear is not network-friendly, we were going to put a small Linux box in each room to publish the images on our intranet. We found that none of the vendors would disclose the protocol used between the host and the hardware. We tried reverse engineering it and found it very difficult.
I now work for one of the companies that makes these things. Although we have them in our conference rooms, nobody uses them for obvious reasons. I wrote an email to the product manager explaining why $VBC had not bought the product, and that enterprise customers need open, standards-based products that they can integrate into larger systems. I got no response.
So, aside from the inherent defects of these gadgets, they are one more bright idea that will never come to fruition under the current PC-centric, proprietary mindset. I really think that the current Microsoft-inspired climate is throttling the development of the computer industry.
They're very convenient when the professor decides to utilize them. In a digital design class I'm taking now, where we program in assembly, it's nice for us and for the professor to be able to display and scroll through sample code.
There's a regular white board right next to the SmartBoard, so the professor can write as he pleases while leaving the SmartBoard display alone.
The only bad thing about them is the "overwriting" of the image with the special markers. Anything written is very, very low resolution. About the only thing our professor uses that feature for is to cross out a section of code on the screen.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
We have several classrooms at my school with smart boards. The only problem with them is relying on the projector. It's quite annoying when the teacher is creating a shadow so you can't read what he's writing. Other than that the boards are great. They are especially helpful in my physics class because you can use circle and straight line drawing tools instead of the teacher trying to draw the diagrams all by hand.
Today in compsci we just set up the one that had been sitting in the back of the room for over a year taking up space. Everyone loved to pick up a marker and write on the 'screen' with their finger. Also, it was good for the ap students learning binary search trees; the teacher put up a blank binary tree and they filled in each node/leaf.
This, or some kind of digital-paper technology would massively improve the usefulness of pen-tablets. They'd be easier to get used to (and you'd get more thorougly used to them) if you could see what you were drawing where you were drawing it. having a little notebook-sized white board that keeps track of what I'm drawing would be almost as good as having a screen I could draw directly on.
There are some special purpose digital cameras for whiteboard capture. Take a look at the HawkEye Of course, for casual whiteboard capture, any modern digital camera will do.
Being an educational institute in Calgary, Alberta (where SmartTech is located http://www.smarttech.com ) allows us to "partner" with them and get a lot of this technology into our new teaching facility.
Our more technologically inclined instructors just love them and I highly recommend that people try them out.
Now, I want one of the rear projection models ones for my monitor!!!
>But would you say 640x480 is sufficient resolution for sketching?
Yes, unless you are sketching as art, or are making very detailed sketches.
If your sketches are detailed you're SOL in a classroom, or you'll end up like a lot of out first-time teachers -- adjusting your style so students quit bothering you with "I can't see that!"
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
By using a Mac, you have demonstrated your willingness to spend more for less. The vendor would be foolish not to take advantage of this.
Oh, excuse me. I meant to say: there is no comparison between the Mac version and the Windows version. The Mac version is humane, intuitive and artistic, incorporates the latest advances in human interface design, and is the choice of creative professionals everywhere. In fact, I believe Ghandi sketched out his "passive resistance" strategy on a Mac-Mimio. The Windows version, on the other hand, is a crude, buggy archaic kludge hastily thrown together to make money. It requires the user to write on the board the Windows registration code, the IRQ of the disk controller and a secret activation code printed under the pen cap. It comes with an electric vial of blue paint, to be mounted at the top of the board. At random intervals, a valve opens and the whiteboard goes blue. Aren't you glad you can pay $90 more for quality?
I would like a slightly different form of smart board. While I know of one professor who was going to try to do this, I've not seen anyone actually build one. This would not be for presentations; it would be for derivations and proofs. I mention it mainly as an example of how 'smart' a whiteboard could be.
Suppose you have an LCD touchscreen and a stylus. You write equations to the board, and it recognizes the symbols. Then you can start manipulating the symbols, using a set of mathematical rules (e.g. commutativity of certain operators). You could circle a term and drag it to the other side of an equals sign, with the board automatically flipping the sign of the term. Or it could differentiate the two sides of an equation with respect to some variable.
The device should be able to copy the equation to the next line, effecting the changes and verifying their correctness. The device should allow scrolling off the board, while recording every operation.
This is clearly a different thing, and not necessarily too useful for presentations and lectures. But it would certainly be useful for research.
I set up some of this to check my thesis work. I did my M.S. in robotic dynamics. There were many equations to derive, with symbols with sub- and superscripts that could easily be confused. So I set up Mathematica scripts that would apply rules to my inputs to determine whether they could be proven from my axioms. It produced TeX output, with an equals sign if it could verify the equation, a not-equals sign if it could disprove it, and the common question-equals for any equations it couldn't decide. It was easy to glance at the output and see what lines needed attention. This was an effective tool in deriving the correct equations. The only significant part that I didn't build was an interactive user interface.
With the recent production of many touchscreen LCDs in laptops and tablet PCs, this may be a fine time to explore the handwriting recognition aspects.
I can just see it now...
:)
get one of these bad-boys and use it lying face up on the gaming table top.
DM could load images of the current area (complete with grid) and then players could move their mini's on the surface, or draw their location with pens.
DM could draw things that happen.
It would be great.
we have smart boards at my school (carlisle hs, carlisleschools.org/chs, not that you'd ever want to visit it really) from some big grant that my school. but besides that, i have had great experience with them.. at least with the teachers who know how to use them (my physics and math teacher). they are much clearer than chalkboards, and less messy than whiteboards. the problem about low resolution doesn't really matter, because if you're sitting in the back of the room you can't see anything small anyway. imho smartboards a great thing that i can fall asleep to in class.
http://www.dansdata.com/mimio.htm
I have discovered a wonderful
The University of Waikato and Manakau Institute of Technology (in New Zealand) are developing a system called LIDS (Large Interactive Display Surface.) Basically, a LIDS screen is a large pane of glass in a wooden frame with a Mimio on it. Software has been developed by the Uni for various applications.
The most obviously useful application is lecture capture - the LIDS software hooks into Powerpoint and enables a PPT slideshow to be played as usual, but all the annotations and changes on it can be recorded into the document, along with audio. Someone who didn't go to the lecture can then take this PPT file from the web and play back the entire lecture - changes, the lecture delivery, everything that was said and done.
There are 'meeting support' options in LIDS - you can sit a video camera in front of the screen and it will record a silhouette, which gets broadcasted to other stations running the software; on their screen, they see what you see and they see your silhouette as if you were writing on the same screen.
LIDS is a research project, and isn't aimed commercially yet. Lots of usability testing is happening on various aspects of the system at present, in both CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work) and single user aspects.
The most interesting part of the research has been the development of a new metaphor for computer interaction - LIDS works in real space, where multiple people can use it, and interact with it at the same time.
The project doesn't have a web page, but there have been a number of papers submitted to various conferences. A good overview can be found in a paper by Prof. Mark Apperley and Dr. Masood Masoodian from the CS dept at Waikato, which can be found at this link.
Flipcharts, you say? http://www.numonics.com/ifcpage.htm
Sigh. I fondly remember the days of my youth, when the teacher would send me off to make copies of something, and I would stand next to the mimeograph machine watching the papers come out at eye level, toxic vapours wafting delicately up into my nasal cavity and down through my lungs.
:)
It was a happy time, a dizzy time, a time of flowers and birds, and little blue men singing about little Jackie Paper and some puffy dragon.
Gosh I miss the good old days before photocopiers and laser printers.
Do I win a prize :)?
Sig goes here
The original poster's objections still stand - the most imnportant features you gain with an expensive interactive "board" can be had for less than $200 with a simple digital camera, or better yet, just go back to handwritten overhead slides, and scan them in after the class: Cost? $60 for the scanner, and a few minutes of TA labor that is effectively free.
I have only seen ONE active board system that worked well enough to be useful, and unfortunately, it's not produced anymore: Xerox used to have a division called LiveWorks, which made a product called the LiveBoard. LiveBoard was a Windows 95 PC (This was about 1995, so that was current) with a very nice rear-projection LCD screen, and a set of smart "markers" of different colors. It could, of course display anything the PC could, plus overlay annotations, remote videoconference pictures, of pretty much whatever else you might want. As you might expect from a PARC-derived product, it was very well thought-out, and offered user interface capabilities that *really* made sense in the context - things like the ability to build lists with text recognition and insert things in a list or outline live, select text or drawings by simply drawing a circle around them and then dragging them where you want (great for suddenly realizing you didn't leave *quite* enough room for the equation describing the detailed diagram you just finished), and, of course, the ability to interoperate seamlessly with remote LiveBoards in other locations.
I can tell you that LiveBoard and a good (full duplex, ala Polycom) speakerphone was a far, far better remote teamwork tool than any videoconferencing system ever built.
Like many Xerox products, it was a bit ahead of the market, and Xerox made its usual marketing mistakes: 1) Try to recover development costs in the first units sold, pricing yourself well out of the market, and 2) Once this results in disappointing sales, kill the program, because it obviously has no potential to generate revenue. The number of times Xerox has screwed up really good products using this exact formula is mind-boggling.
Anyway, that's all to say the LiveBoard was better in 1995 than I think anything is even today. It's a shame that software isn't available, since the outline processing part alone would be quite useful on a tablet computer, too... There really should be somthing that allows this sort of interaction, should touchscreen-like things become as common as they should be. (Sun's old ShowMe product came as close as anyone has to doing this correctly in software only, but lacked support for nonstandard input hardware. Maybe Sun will think about turning ShowMe loose under the SCSL...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Actually, my school has quite a few smart boards. They are gradually integrating them into every class. I use one in Calculus, Computer Science, and Networking while others use them in some English, Science, and Social Studies classes also. The things aren't cheap, and the projectors cost even more (the light bulbs start at $400) but the ability to post notes from class online at a site ironically known as blackboard is a nice little extra. In the long run, they're fairly unnecessary, but nice. Our school just likes to show off (wireless network and such).
Basically, eBeam and Mimio are pretty similar technologies. eBeam is smaller with more features while Mimio is a little cheaper and bigger. Except the newest systems from both companies are about the same price.
The nice thing is eBeam has that sharing thing without having to pay. They also work with Palm, but will they ever work with PocketPC?????