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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...
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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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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).
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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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
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'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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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.
So you're saying if you specify price in hexidecimal British pounds, they'll give it to you for free? Sweeeet . . .