Search the Community

Hello All, I have an issue where when using activinspire flipcharts, I can use the pen function to draw if I use the mouse on the PC, however if I try and do the same thing with the pen using the touch feature on the promethean smart board I get nothing. It recognises the board is being touched and will move the cursor along with my finger/the smartboard pen, but wont draw. There is instead a clear trail that follows my movement (see image attached). This is happening even I reselect the pen with the touch feature and then try to draw. I'm hoping there is a setting that has been turned off but after some time spent on this I am stumpped. If anyone has any ideas, that would be amazing. Thanks

Hi all, My client has been using Activinspire as their main software for their classes. We are now looking to replace their IWBs. My question is ActivInspire compatible with all brands of IWBs? or is the software specific to Promethean boards. Main concern are the IWB pens and if they will function on that software. Many thanks

One of our smartboards has an odd problem which is whenever a teacher writes on the board it makes very jagged random vertical lines. I have tried orienting/calibrating/resetting the board with the notebook but that hasn't worked. Attached is what the lines look like. Has anybody else had this issue or know of a solution to it? Could there be something interfering with the pen to the board? We're currently using the 600 series SMART Board Interactive whiteboards with a Macbook running OS X 10.5.7. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Near the SmartBoard in my classroom there's a severe notice warning against using whiteboard markers on the board. But on an old SmartBoard doc I found on the web, it says it's fine. There's the normal advice about removing permanent ink - the scourge of traditional whiteboards. Is there anything about more recent SmartBoards that justifies banning the use of the board as a regular whiteboard, using regular whiteboard markers? I don't like signs that frighten teachers away from using technology. When they're already fairly technology averse, it's the last thing they need. Unless, of course, there are valid reasons for that prohibition. Cheers.

We've inherited some ActivPanels and one of them has a damaged pen, the nib is missing. I'd like to get a replacement but there is no manufacturer or model number at all on the pen. Does anyone know whether we can just get any generic stylus, or does it have to be a Promethean one? I can't tell whether this old pen is a Promethean one or not and can't see anything like it online. Does anyone recognise it? Thank you.

Hi there, We've just rolled out deployment of Surface Pros to our teaching staff, unfortunately there seems to be a nasty bug where the screen freezes & goes black when you attempt to use the pen. The issue is covered on this page - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/surface-pro-7-crashes-when-using-a-pen-with-an/82ef28e5-5244-45a1-ba80-27549a545ee0?rtAction=1615808474829&page=1 in particular in the comment by Kelan: "This has been bothering us for months. Every time one of our users went to use their Surface Pen on their Surface Pro 7 in OneNote, their screen would flash black. At times, it would disconnect them from Miracast. Sometimes the entire device would freeze requiring a forced reset. Other times, Teams would crash in the background and black out requiring a forced quit via task manager. All of these issues were caused by using the pen. We have over 100 Surface devices in our environment (school), all with this problem. After weeks of digging and trial and error (with growing frustration amongst staff), I narrowed it down to a DWM.exe crash (as reported in event viewer): Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\dwm.exe Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll As far as I can tell, this being caused by an incompatible Intel Iris Graphics driver that installed itself as part of the 2004 or 20H2 update." We've tried the fix outlined in Kelan's comment but it doesn't seem to have worked, has anyone else encountered this and managed to resolve it? We're trying the intel driver assistant now as that is also suggested in the thread but hopefully someone has come across this before Cheers

Hi, I'm the techy at a three-form primary, and we have a Promethean board where the pen is significantly delayed. Particularly noticeable when drawing circles, or anything else that is round. This problem only emerged after updating the Win10, however we have 25 other classroom machines (all that were updated to Win10 at the same time) which have never had this problem. I have tried the following Standard restarts of both machine and board Disconnecting and reconnecting to machine Playing with different drivers (both from ActivDriver and Device Manager) I have tried installing just about every version of ActivDriver Carrying out standard Windows Updates It is also worth noting that the PC doesn't automatically pick up the connection, and you instead have to go into ActivDriver and click "Find" everytime you want it to connect. Any ideas?

So I always heard from teachers and such at the school I once went to about having to be careful with those interactive white board pens, because they're very expensive and such (seriously, how much do people pay for these things? I see Promethean pens for £12 a piece on one site). Well, in reality, you'd be shocked to see what's inside them, part of a little project I'm doing involving a standard pen from the guys you all know and...love(?) includes completely taking apart one of the things, so I thought I'd share my findings with you guys, someone's bound to find it interesting. I managed to get hold of a dead pen to experiment with, whether it's still dead when I'm finished with it is left to be discovered, might actually work when I'm done, that'd be pretty nice. Step 1: Removing that excess plastic tail: http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eeyek.jpg Maybe that's where most of the money is, in the excess plastic that only serves as a bit of comfort and to make the pen look a lot bigger than the innards? And you find this... http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eewpt.jpg Not much to it, I must say... Step B: A bit of plastic mutilation later and you find this bit under the other side of the ring, that red button is the barrel, as an FYI. Lots of lovely pink wire coil there, no doubt it's coated in pink stuff to scare people away, or perhaps to make it not move one inch unless you unravel it (and boy do you regret it...) http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eex4s.jpg Under the tape there seemed to be some sort of brown thing, it looked suspiciously like chocolate from my point of view, unfortunately the camera wasn't very good, so it's rather blurry. It wouldn't surprise me if it was chocolate though. http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eex8f.jpg The unravelling... http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eexch.jpg At this point, I'm starting to regret what I'd done. Moreso here. http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eexfm.jpg The remains of the shell: http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eexwc.jpg What was left (had to remove the barrel button to get it out of the shell, not that I need that button) http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eeyek.jpg And of course, the mess. http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/2eejuj.jpg I'll keep you guys posted as I work on this, I decided to take a break from untangling that horrible length of wire without breaking anything (either wire or the contact with the board, I'm not that proficient in soldering...). Hopefully I can get this into a glove, with the coil in the index finger of the glove (without cooking the finger, of course). But yeah, your highly expensive IWB Pens are essentially a coil of wire in a plastic shell, always nice to know isn't it?

we have several Interactive Whiteboards brought from a company called Interactive Education, I believe that the boards are a Numonics board (might be Genieware not 100% sure). The pens from Interactive Education have been steadily raising, does anyone know another supplier of these pens?

Hi, One of our Smart Boards (Hardware model) SB600 isn't detecting pen strokes correctly. When you pick up one of the pens the light on the tray comes on as normal and the pen tool is selected in Notebook 11, but when you come to write it starts to drag out a selection with the cursor tool instead. In a (probably) unconnected issue as well, when you select the pen tool manually, it writes but comes out wobbly no matter how many times the board is oriented. I've tried Smart updates, as well as reinstalling both Notebook and the drivers. We have teaching observations next week so I need to get it sorted this week if possible. Anyone else encountered this problem? Thanks,

We've recently had a batch of these installed in our school and only a week later around half of them have broken or a showing signs of hairline cracks appearing around the middle join in the pen so look like they're about to break. Ordinarily we'd just buy additional pens but in my opinion this is a design flaw that could affect the replacements rather than staff being clumsy. Plus they cost over £100 each so I'm worried we could end up with a bill of thousands a year to keep these podiums in spare pens! Has anyone else encountered similar issues?