Keeping your interactive whiteboard interactive!

This post relates to a couple of earlier ones giving advice on how to install your data projector. See here. A lot of teachers receive an interactive whiteboard setup without really having a clear vision about how it can be used with their students. It can simply end up as an expensive way of doing the same type of 'chalk and talk' teaching that could be done on a standard board. If you want to give your students the full benefit of the possibilities of an interactive board, you need to make sure that they can physically access it. The earlier posts about mounting the data projector talk about putting the image at an accessible height and making sure that it is not too big. The actual optimal positioning depends on the age of your students and the type of teaching you plan to do. We think there are two main setups for school aged students.

Small group setup: How do teachers of early school age students teach? Well, they don't sit them all at desks a long way from the teacher and lecture them! They generally have them sitting on the floor in small groups, close to the action. Having a large, fixed board a metre from the floor, is probably not a useful solution. A much better, more interactive option, would be to have large LCD screen (cheaper than a projector in many cases), mounted down low where the students can both see it and reach all points of the screen. A uBoard unit, which is only 20cm long and slim, mounted to a 40" LCD TV may be an inexpensive and very effective solution. In practice, schools who use this setup may want to fit a thin sheet of clear acrylic over the screen to protect it from enthusiastic little hands. We'll cover the second main setup type in our next post

Interesting Problem

We struck an interesting issue this week. One of the schools that have sourced equipment through 3Pi reported that they couldn't get the system to work in one of their classrooms.
The classroom setup was unusal in that the projected image was quite high (above the floor).
They had been trying to calibrate from desk height aiming the wiimote up, but it just wouldn't calibrate.

When we looked upwards along the top of the wiimote, to the middle of the screen, there was an incredibly bright reflection. It seems that the combination of a steeper than usual upwards angle and a very reflective screen were confusing the wiimotes camera. When we tried the wiimote positioned at double the height, it calibrated perfectly, as it also did when we positioned it up by the projector looking down. (Another issue for such a high setup is that only very tall people could interact with the image anyway - not good for young students!)