Graphics Tablets & Smartboards

[Morning]

Been having a few problems (alignment ect) with SMARTboards and think a possible solution may be to use a graphics tablet as the input device. Thus allowing users to still write on the smartboard but not having to rely so much on the touch sensitive aspects. Anyone have any experience of this any thoughts?

[gshaw]

We've got Smart Airliners which are basically a wireless tablet, works pretty well but takes some getting used to when you try to co-ordinate your hand to match up to the board!

[enjay]

We've got some Airliners and wireless Wacom tablets (which is what's under the Smart logo on the Airliner anyway) and a couple of wired ones too. They work really well, but aren't perfect replacements for interactive boards, as they are more fiddly to use.

If you have some boards already in place which aren't working, I'd be more inclined to try and fix that issue rather than "work around" it with a few hundred pounds of tablet.

[SimpleSi]

Yes - I've got 3 airliners in use for old Smartboards (5xx series) that have bad alignment issues.

At a cost of £250-£300 they are 1/4 of price of new board.

But, the teacher needs to be able to use it and some don't have the good enough spatial awareness/hand eye co-ord needed to write on the slate, watch it on the screen and talk to pupils at the same time but some are fine.

(I'm not very good at it myself!)

One of my teachers is brilliant with it and says we could replace her Smartboard with a white blanket and she'd be fine

They are also very good for controlling hall projector/computer combos

regards

Simon

[enjay]

But, the teacher needs to be able to use it and some don't have the good enough spatial awareness/hand eye co-ord needed to write on the slate, watch it on the screen and talk to pupils at the same time but some are fine.

(I'm not very good at it myself!)

Same here - I can only write on them if I'm sitting down, which rather negates the interactivity! Even then, my writing is shocking (more so than normal, I mean!) and much too big; not to mention it took far too long to write anything. We have found that, because they're not immediately easy to work with, they didn't see much use as they couldn't be passed around for the students to use, which is how we wanted them. They still have some purpose for graphing in Maths, but I found that I could achieve the same results with a cordless mouse.

You may find a cordless mouse and the cheapest e-beam thing (Whiteboard, I think it is called) do what you need. I've just started looking at the e-beams myself...