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College CIO Predicts Tablets Will Kill Smart Boards
CowboyRobot writes "Keith Fowlkes (vice chancellor for information technology and CIO at the University of Virginia's College at Wise) has a commentary at Information Week in which he makes the point that moving forward, colleges will be able to dump all the 'smart' classroom tools and devices (e.g. electronic whiteboards, clickers, projection systems, etc.) and will only need to support students' tablets. The reasoning comes down to the return on investment, which is easy to argue for tablets but not for other classroom technologies. Standardization of video across devices remains a problem, as does the issue of where files are stored and how they are shared. But these are solvable problems and we will soon see the day when electronic whiteboards are a distant memory."
I think the issue of file storage was solved by openafs a long time ago, certainly at the scale of a small university.
Let's put aside the fact that a LOT of professors don't like the idea of students even bringing smartphones into class, much less tablets and notebooks. Let's put aside the fact this guy sounds like someone whining about his budget, who has possibly been approached by a slick salesman who's sold him on the idea of some app that's just going to require a "small investment." Let's put aside the fact the professors are still, by and large, a bunch of old farts--many of whom are still using the same blackboard presentations and transparencies that they were using 30 years ago.
To me, the most obvious counter to this assertion is the notebook. Students have had notebooks en masse for 10-15 years now, and THOSE didn't really revolutionize the classroom. And if notebooks, which are way more powerful and open than tablets, didn't really change things all that much--then what makes him think that tablets will?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Tablet for the actual interaction, projector so all the others can see.
That would certainly kill off the need for smart boards, which are just obtuse to work with in general.
Makes sense. Why have just the one big screen that can display information when you could have a whole department devoted to a system that can push information to a wide range of tablets with different operating systems, software installations and capabilities. It's far more fun trying to work around the 30% of students who don't have LaTeX installed, the 42% without Flash, the 19% without an HTML5 browser and the guy who should be expelled because he prefers a notebook and pen.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I think "standardization of video standards" would be the biggest bugbear here - which college student will want to avoid a device that uses the latest Retina display or equivalent, if it means the 640x480, or equivalent "low-end" spec of the time will look either tiny or crappy on their screen? Look back a few years - we had the VGA "standard", XGA, WGA, etc., then the whole 4:3, 16:9, or 16:10 aspect ratio shift.
Uh, sure. Ever try to actually get it working? Good luck doing that on iOS - it is a royal pain on Linux, let alone Windows.
The sad thing is that OpenAFS is the only networked POSIX filesystem I'm aware of that actually works reasonably well and is secure. Pity that nobody actually uses it. NFSv4 with all the features enabled looks to be almost as good, and just as painful to set up.
Why is it that I can take any Windows box and right click on a folder and turn on sharing, enter a password, and get something that is fairly secure, and yet the same feature does not exist on Linux? Sure, for a fortune 500 company setting up Kerberos and such makes sense, but to share a few files between two PCs?
One of the main problems with this idea is that while tablets may certainly offer a good way for professors to guide students, they also come with a plethora of non-educational distractions (i.e., games and the Internet). I use lots of technology in my classroom and students frequently study Internet topics, but in the classroom itself all electronics are banned except those used by me. Students just cannot resist the distraction offered by cell phones and laptops, and classroom discussion suffers as a result.
Tablets didn't kill smartboards - cell phone cameras did. I've been in over 100 different client boardrooms and seen dozens of smartboard setups, but I've never actually seen one that worked properly. A plain whiteboard and a cell phone camera, on the other hand, capture the notes very simply and effectively. It may not be the fanciest solution but it's by far the most convenient.
Most wireless routers can only support 50 clients at a time and that's in theory on the specs, not in practice. So unless they want RF-proof walls and 1 router per classroom, and no other 2.4GHz devices in the entire school, I think there might just be a little problem getting them on the network to stream course materials and presentations. So no, tablets in every students' is an idiotic idea that won't work.
oh for ... sake.
The SmartBoard physical device can be replaced with a $50 Wiimote ($20 clone) and infrared light pen ($30)
The SmartBoard software, on the other hand, is what you're really paying for.
Here's a free alternative to the software:
http://open-sankore.org/
The only person who we should even consider giving tech to is the teacher.
What kills the SmartBoard and tablets in the class is the low resolution. It's like drawing with a crayon. And it's difficult to face the students when using it.
I've found the best alternative is a simple document camera that can be built with an HD webcam (requires a minimum 1024x768 projector as well) and some free software I wrote. And yes, I used this in an actual classroom during my student teaching.
http://coteach.org/1000-classroom/
I put together the $1000 classroom to try this stuff out. Give me a steady supply of dry erase markers for students to use and a document camera and I'm happy. With the document camera I can sit or stand facing the students while I write. And everyone can see clearly what I'm writing. For student interaction, they come up and write on the board.
But, this is why I'm not rich. I'm not in the business of selling overpriced worthless crap to the education system.
Work Safe Porn
Having worked for a "smart" board maker a few years ago, we did a study that dealt with a problem where most teachers used their fancy new expensive interactive smart board as nothing more then a second monitor and glorified projector, if even at all. Our software tracks board touches and saw that there was very little user interaction. In the same study we saw a huge proliferation in the use of tablets in schools which are highly interactive and touchable.
The reality is that the education systems are slowly changing away from the 100's year old paradigm of people lecturing to a new concept of students "exploring" education at their own pace. Not all students learn at the same pace, some students learn math and logic faster then language, others the opposite. Forcing all students to study the same subject matter at the same time is why schools are good at creating failures rather then successes. A child that doesn't do math by grade 3 should not be considered remedial, for instance, and thus shunted to a system of lower expectations, their math skills may have clicked in later in development and could be as or even more proficient then anyone else that learned math earlier.
So, the concept of a fixed focal point for a classroom is slowly eroding to more student-centric learning. The idea of self-guided learning is an emerging concept in many schools where the curriculum is a serious of self-guided lessons where the "teacher" is there to help students understand the lessons when they struggle.
The problem with the company I worked for (and why I left) was that in spite of having this study and seeing their product tucked away in a corner being unused, they still insist on creating single focal point solutions for the classroom and only loosely investing into tablet based solutions. Sure the concepts of collaboration and interactivity between students is important, but not necessarily the only way to proceed with education. Smart boards are still expensive and often underutilized and in spite of some initial interest level from students, quickly become bored with the technology, unlike tablets.
Better integration between smart boards and tablets would be the only way to save this company, but alas, is being greatly overlooked.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I've been recording and posting my lectures at JHU using Camtasia for many years...
I whiteboard using a graphics tablet (Wacom Bamboo fun, drawing ink notes on Evernote). I write code examples on the fly in Eclipse (and if Android apps, run them in an emulator or use droid@screen to mirror). I surf to websites. When I rarely have slides, I show them. Everything I say (using a headset mic) and do is recorded using Camtasia. After class I do some minor edits and post the videos and example code from the class on the course website after class.
Much less expensive than a smartboard (even moreso if you use alternate recording software), and the students love it (almost everyone comments on it in the evals)
I'm a little surprised that the students still come to class... I suspect it's because they like being able to ask questions and interact with the other students.
I had several professors who had classes moved to get older rooms with chalk boards 10 years ago. The main complaints I heard were that dry erase boards were hard to clean, the markers were more expensive/dried out/missing/bigger, and that the dry erase boards had to be replaced every 2-3 years if they were used a lot. These professors (some of the best I had, including an amazing CS prof) put up with all short comings of chalk (like breathing in all that nasty dust) because chalk had never left them stranded MULTIPLE TIMES in front of there classes the way dry erase boards had.
I'm a college professor.
The clickers, which are expensive for students, were never needed in the first place. The people who pioneered this teaching technique started by having students raise hands to vote. They observed that some students were reluctant to be embarrassed in front of their peers by raising their hands for a choice that might be wrong, so they handed out large cardboard cards with letters ABCD on them. Students held up the card so only the professor could see. Worked great. The clickers are a waste of money for students, and the extra functionality they make possible is extremely minimal in proportion to the cost.
The idea of only supporting students' tablets is silly. It may be true at the University of Spoiled Children that basically everyone owns a laptop or tablet and brings it to school, but I assure you that that's not true at the community college where I teach. My students are generall extremely cheap and extremely broke. The projector works great. It's up at the front of the room where everyone can see it. If I need to point to it, I can pick up a meter stick and point. If I depend on students to have tablets, then at any given time some big percentage of them will be off task for a variety of reasons: don't own one, didn't bring it to school, dead batteries, using it to play games, doesn't have the right browser plugin, doesn't have enough resolution, wifi isn't working, ...
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