SMART board and Qwizdom

[awakedreaminguk]

I've just managed to borrow some Qwizdom voting devices from university. Does anyone know if these directly link into SMART board software? If yes, can anyone explain how?

I'm sure I went to an e-learning centre nearby and saw these Qwizdom devices working directly within the SMART board software, but can't quite figure it out.

Thanks in advance!

[bossman]

Unless Quizdom have made their software networkable and able to run without administrator rights then I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

We had a teacher who thought he new more about software than anyone else and proceeded to purchase it for his dept after being shown it by a rep with a very powerful laptop (very resource hungry) who failed to point out that it wasn't networkable and that it needed admin rights to run it.

All the other teachers followed my advice and we went down the activstudio3 route for all our IWBs are Promethean.

After much deliberation and gnashing of teeth I finally convinced him that he had spent just over 2k for something which would not benefit his dept but it was too late as he had paid for it. Only solution was to install on each of his dept staffs laptop and they could plug in to IWB and run from there.

Anyway to get back to the question you were asking how to couple up to a Smartboard well I would think it is just the same as for a promethean via a laptop or computer conected to the smartboard.
The software runs from the laptop/computer and the receiver for the voting pods fits into the laptop/computer you then configure the voting pods via the software.

have you been on their website:
Audience Response Systems | Electronic Voting | Interactive Learning | Qwizdom

[bossman]

@awakedreaminguk:

Here is a helping hand:

[laserblazer]

I agree with Bossman. The other thing is it such a pain to set up and put away. Most of the lesson has gone! We got around it by setting it up a specific classroom. That said, I don't think it has been used in years and most teachers don't even know we have it.

[SimpleSi]

Can't help with request

Only one of my schools ever bought voting devices and they were Quizdom - absolute nightmare - and their own software was diabolical.

Seeing the Year 6 teacher trying to set up and run a lesson was like watching a reception class on their 1st PE Lesson

regards

Simon

[f21970]

Our teaching staff use Quizdom (got about 150 handsets!), and it's now not too bad to set up. You have to run the software as Admin after install, and install the driver as admin, but after that restricted users run fine. I'm not certain what you mean about 'integrating with the Smartboard software', but the board stays interactive if that's what you mean. All Actionpoint is really is a toolbar in Powerpoint, and the teacher just creates a Powerpoint quiz. Downside is that they have to have to make it a quiz using the Actionpoint toolbar with the Actionpoint driver activated - i.e. with the receiver plugged in. So, they can do the majority of the work at home, with a bit of fiddling on a free in a classroom.

Overall, it's not the worst system I've seen, but it's not the best.

[powdarrmonkey]

Downside is that they have to have to make it a quiz using the Actionpoint toolbar with the Actionpoint driver activated - i.e. with the receiver plugged in. So, they can do the majority of the work at home, with a bit of fiddling on a free in a classroom.

(my emphasis)

This isn't the case for us: maybe we have more recent software, but our staff can do everything without the box plugged in, and then come and get it from us just before their lesson.

Unless Quizdom have made their software networkable and able to run without administrator rights then I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

We had a teacher who thought he new more about software than anyone else and proceeded to purchase it for his dept after being shown it by a rep with a very powerful laptop (very resource hungry) who failed to point out that it wasn't networkable and that it needed admin rights to run it.

Again, this isn't my experience. We push out an MSI of it and it runs perfectly happily for users, though I don't remember if the driver needs installing by hand or not (I think not). The latest software is on their website, fill in the form and they will email you a download link. It requires .Net 3.5 nowadays.

Anyway, to answer the original question: no, it doesn't integrate with SMART in the Notebook sense, but yes you can continue to use the smartboard to click through slides, draw on top of them and so on.

[awakedreaminguk]

Thanks to everyone for your replies. I haven't used SMART board or Qwizdom much, but your responses have made some things more clear to me about how to use them. I quite clearly need to look into both SMART board and Qwizdom quite a bit more. Based upon what I had seen I assumed they integrated quite straightforwardly, but obviously not.

For the record, the only reason that I have Qwizdom as the brand of voting machines is because these are the ones I can borrow from university for free. Are there any other brands you'd recommend for voting machines? As a resource I think I'd find them useful, but obviously that would have to be at the right price AND right difficulty in terms of setting up.

Also, I haven't found any problem with having to set Administrator rights for the software either. I've got Windows 7 and version 2.042 for reference.

[powdarrmonkey]

The most recent version is 2.4.something I think, and it fixes lots of stability issues for us when using Office 2007 on XP SP3.

From memory it might be 2.4.5.3.

[bossman]

@powdarrmonkey:

It seems that they have updated there software and for the good by the look of it but at the time which would be around 3-4 years ago it really was rubbish and they even admitted that they hadn't developed it to work over a network.

So pleased they did something with it as it did look like something which could be used in a positive way but not for us at that time.