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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!"
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.
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!
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.
The bad part about these smartboards, I believe, can be completely solved with next version smartboards.
Those are exactly the ones we used. I didn't include the name in my original post since I couldn't remember who manufactured the boards.
We had two of the larger screens, paired side-by-side, and one project capable of projecting an image onto each screen concurrently. We had a windows box that ran the smartboard software, and we'd load our presentations on there, and use the board and markers to write on our slides as we discussed them with the class.
Another monitor hooked up to the same windows box controlled the projection unit. We'd choose sources of either the windows box, a document projector/scanner, our laptops could be hooked up and selected as well, and there was also a VCR option to project video to the smartboard, but we never got to try that feature.
In all, the smartboards were more memorable than the class, but I would have done *much* better in high school had some courses used these boards to illustrate points (Biology, history, math, you name it!)
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.
Oh yeah, one other difference between the SmartBoard and the Mimio (sorry for the mis-spelling above), is that the SmartBoard can be used with regular styli, rather than specialized ones.
/. folks, is that SmartTech has Linux support. At first glance, Mimio doesn't appear to.
The way the SmartBoard works is that it has four trays at the bottom, one for red, green, and blue markers, and one for an eraser. There's a led/photocell on each, which lets the board determine when you've picked up a given marker, and thus will draw in the appropriate color (or erase). If you wanted to actually physically write on the board, you could use a regular red/green/blue dry erase marker (personally, I never wrote on it, just let the LCD project digital ink, to keep the surface from looking cruddy after awhile).
When all markers were in their places, then touching the unit gave mouse-like behaviour, so you could use windows applications just by touching the screen with your finger. Very cool. Similarly, if you didn't want to use the stylus, you could just pick it up (so the unit saw the marker missing), then draw with your finger, which seems weird at first, but I prefer it at times.
Oh yeah, another big feature of interest to
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I think what they mean is that you can use your own projector to project web pages, PowerPoint, whatever on a whiteboard. Then, you can use the mimioMouse software to "click" on the projected image. It's like having a huge touchscreen that you can also write on.
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...
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.
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.
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).