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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!"
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?
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).
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
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
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 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!
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.
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!
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.