Visualizers

[GuyJD]

I have used Airserver few years ago at a different school. With Airserver can you lock it down? for example I don't want class 4s teacher accidently connecting to class 4j laptop.

I'm pretty sure you can put a passcode in the option on the receiver so you have to know that to connect.

[LeMarchand]

Wow your school must have money. They cost £800+

 

I wish they'd spend the money on more useful stuff in our school!

[maark]

They are pretty good for that - that is how our staff use them - via laptop into docking station into promethean screens

 

I've had a quote for them. Are they any good? how is the picture quality and focus? our main purpose of them will be in guided reading. They want to put the story book under the visualiser so that the pupils in class can read together. it will be connected to the laptop on to the IWB.

[paulellam]

Some of our first ones are 6 years old and still working perfectly fine, so although they cost a lot, they have been a good ROI, we rolled them out over several years because of the cost.

[Sydders01]

@Koldov Please do you have the drivers for this visualizer? I can't find it anywhere as it has being discontinued.

We use a mixture of these and an older version:

 

AVerVision F17HD+ Flexible Arm Visualizer Document Camera | AVer Global

 

They aren't cheap and although I understand the 'just a webcam on a stick' comment, I think it depends on if the teachers are going to use all the extra functionality.

 

Or you can look at the extras as being a form of future proofing and the software helps with annotating the image as well.

 

We tried cheaper models, but were plagued with software issues and lighting (50/60Hz problems - lines on the screen). Some wouldn't really produce a clear enough image, some wouldn't zoom, some wouldn't even load the software.

 

It was a bit of a struggle to convince the SLT to shift their expectations, but when I did get one of the cheaper ones to work it was obvious they weren't going to be any good in a real world classroom scenario, there was no real zoom without quality loss/lag and the room had to be light (which meant the projected image was washed out on the screen).

 

The Aver ones are much better quality (and rightly so... £££) but they are a bit more robust and easy for the teachers to use (as they have auto focus/auto image buttons). You can use either a VGA/HDMI (directly to the projectoror) or USB through a PC/laptop to use the software.

[Koldov]

Hi @jamieleic,

 

We don't use 'drivers' as such...

 

99% of our teachers use the visualiser directly connected to the projector through the VGA output (unplug it from the laptop and plug it into the visualiser).

 

The 1% that actually want greater functionality, I have installed the A+ suite from Aver on their laptops and once connected with the USB cable the laptops pick it up fine and when the software is opened (Sphere2) displays the feed from the visualiser ok.

 

We are running Win 10 LTSB 2016 - I just checked installing the software below on a laptop and it seems to work ok:

 

https://www.averusa.com/education/support/f17-8m