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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!"
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.
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/
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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 :)
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.
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.
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"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."
The mimio software obviously captures the drawing as marker strokes. The software has a playback feature. It is somewhat useful. Someone who was not present at the meeting can see the ideas that started forming but were then discarded.
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
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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...
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).
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The software also lets the board act as a giant mouse tablet, making all of your software touch aware. Project a web page and touch the board with your finger and it's the same as if you clicked on the link.
I've done demonstrations for several high schools and colleges in our area who've been interested in new teaching aids.
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
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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.
Quick tip: if you write a a dry erase board with a permanent marker, write over the permanent stuff in a normal dry erase marker and them clean off as normal.
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.