Wireless screen mirroring vs Touchboard

[Alis_Klar]

This might be more aimed at teachers but what is peoples preference for annotations when teaching.

 

Some schools schools have stopped relying on a Interactive Touchboard and are using wireless screen mirroring and a touch screen laptops to achieve the same thing.

 

Taken over a school that had Touch screen Chromebooks with Chromecasts and we have put in Chromeboxes connected via HDMI and USB to the touchboards.

 

The touchboards are playing up now and it has thrown a spanner in the works.  We are seeing lots of phantom clicks occurring on boards.

 

I have removed the blu-tacked cards that were blocking the IR sensors and cleaned off the layer of dust on the bottom bezel.  They are all early generation IR LCD Smartboards.

 

 

[ICT_GUY]

What you will find is that the IR leds have a life span and teachers unless properly trained normally refuse to turn the boards off when they are not being used, so they are on all through the school day, lunch times, break times, after school. I find they tend to burn out around the 8 year mark.

 

You can check for this using your phone camera. The phone camera has a sensor, I also made an ir led tester a while back. Just a ir sensor, transistor and a led that lights when the sensor detects IR.

 

We use prometheran boards. Keep in mind though that the latest generation have a 5 year warranty and the back light lasts 5 years and a few months. Only £1000 for the board though. So £200 per year running costs. They also come with an android pc of sorts if that floats your boat. All of our teachers prefere teaching at the board for some things, at their pc for others.

 

 

[BenQ_Chris]

@Alis_Klar I can only talk about the BenQ side, but the interactive panels now have casting built in, so it gives users the option to interact at the screen and interact from their device. On the latest boards we also support P2P Miracast with touch. The BenQ screens also come with a 5 year warranty (upon registration), we have 3 ranges (scaling up in spec, performance and price) RE7504A, RE04 & RP04. All have Google Play Store and all will work driver free with external devices. If you'd like to know more or if you have any questions let me know.

 

Thanks Chris.

[TechMonkey]

We have tried to be as flexible as possible to accommodate as wide a range of teaching styles as possible. We have touch boards, with touch screen laptops. We have laptop mount arms at the side of each screen so teachers can mount their laptops and plug in if they want to work at the board.  They also are taught how to cast to the board so they can teach from the back of the room or while roaming. Interestingly touch works with this as well and feeds back to the laptop, though not as well as hoped.

 

I think it works and have had good feedback 

[Ben_Netsupport]

@Alis_Klar Have you looked at Vivi? Vivi supports wireless screen mirroring across all major platforms. You can use any device at the front of the class including, interactive panels,  projectors or TV's and achieve the same result with wireless touchback on both devices. That way, you're not reliant on aging IR boards for input and Vivi gives you the flexibility for your teachers to teach wirelessly and interactively, without the hardware headaches. 

[Alis_Klar]

Thanks for the reminder about Vivi.  This relies on the Chrome Extension as the app is going to be EoL.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/vivi/lmaghghbppffhmndhlneljdcikhdckcn

 

Not sure about latency etc on an underpowered Chromebook.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/vivi/dgplfgkebdggnnkfgljfcfeighbdgmnk

Edited June 30, 2025 by Alis_Klar

[Ben_Netsupport]

@Alis_Klar The Chrome app is indeed EOL, but Vivi has updated their platform to work directly through the web browser instead. Interestingly, older Chromebooks handle it fairly well, since it uses WebRTC. This protocol adjusts dynamically based on your network quality, so performance tends to scale with the available bandwidth and connection stability.