3 Great IWB Resources for Teachers

SMART Exchange – This SMART Exchange site provides several lesson plans and activities for teachers to use in the classroom. SMART lessons are available for a variety of ages and subjects.

Topmarks – An awesome collection of free educational materials for IWBs, Topmarks is a great resource for finding IWB lesson plans and activities. This educational site also features teacher resources, educational sites for classroom, and homework help.

TeacherLED – This site is dedicated to making the use of Interactive Whiteboards (IWB) easier and more productive. This comprehensive site features resources to use with IWBs in math, English, and geometry.

Is this the replacement for the Interactive Whiteboard?

Yesterday, Microsoft released the development kit for Kinect on Windows.  For the uninitiated Kinect is a bodily controlled gaming platform that has been around on the X-box for around a year now.  As a gaming tool Kinect is innovative but not entirely brilliant attempt to revolutionize gaming.

If you look at the video below you will see Kinect running on Windows and get an idea of the possibilities that lay ahead of us.  Surely this would supersede the potential of what current IWB's offer us.

I'd Love to hear what you think after you have had a look.

Free Interactive Whiteboard Resources

Thanks to Scott @ mytopten.com.au

Here's another great interactive whiteboard site that everyone should have bookmarked in their favourites. Topmarks has basically everything you need in all areas.

Hope you enjoy.

Huge collection of Interactive Whiteboard Activities

Phillip Crammond has compiled an extensive bank of interactive resources across all the major curriculum areas.  The site is easy to navigate and full of content that is applicable to all year levels.  I don't have much more to add to this except that is brilliant and definitely worth a look.  Check it out here.

Get ready for the next Generation of IWB's

I won't rave on about this for too long as I accept that that SMART, Promethean and a few other players totally dominate the IWB market at the moment and are the products to have in your classroom.  However last week 2 new products hit the market adopting technology that I have banging on about for a while now that could potentially remove the need for expensive interactive boards in classrooms.

Epson's Brightlink (Looks to be the more refined of the 2) and the Boxlight Projectowrite are 2 products that completely remove the need for a board.  Obviously they need a surface to be projected upon but both work fine on a wall or best of all on a traditional white board at a fraction of the expense.

This cuts out the 2 biggest costs of an IWB being the Board itself and the installation expense.  Both systems utilise infra red technology that was uncovered by the invention of the Wiimote.  Essentially you require an infra red pen or pointer and the receptor is built in to the projector.  Both units are multi touch which instantly puts them miles ahead of their competitors at less than half the price at under $2000 for both units.

Be warned however there is little to no software to support these units and they basically interact with your OS as a mouse and pen.  I am a SMART board user and clearly the best thing about them is their interface and software to support learning.

Surely there are software companies in the wings creating multi platform IWB software that will turn this technology from a glorified mouse into a powerful teaching tool.  Microsoft, Apple & Adobe are you onto this???

Anyhow here is more information on this topic and I have included a couple of videos below that highlight the POTENTIAL of these projectors.  Remembering that POTENTIAL is a very big word.

Boxlight ProjectoWRITE Video - Gotta say it looks a little clunky thus far

Epson Brightlink Video - Great image but does'nt really show us it being used - no software yet??

Would love to hear your thoughts

Amazing Interactive Wiimote IWB - For anyone that missed it the first time

This will probably be nothing new to the majority of edgalaxy readers out there.  But it amazes me how many tech freaks totally missed this the first time and were amazed them self by what little known researcher Johnny Lee nutted out about Nintendo's Wiimote and it's capacity to do far more than play video games.

As is outlined by the videos below he produced a product that supassed a $5000 Interactive whiteboard for around $50.  I made one last year and it worked an absolute treat and I thought to myself at the time "this is end for Smartboards, Promethean and allthese other big plyers inthe IWB market".  We are heading towards 2010 and I still have not seen a mass produced wiimote IWB package that takes advantage of this technology and I am not entirely sure why this is so, whether it's Nintendo, the Big IWB companies or just plain laziness on the part of a nerdy entrepreneur to bring this product to our classrooms.

Anyhow, words cannot explain this below are a couple of movies that do.  Check out Johnny's site to see what else he has been up to late at night.  And I would love to hear you feedback, experiences and thought on the Wii IWB.

Where are the Next Generation Interactive Whiteboards?

Last year I tried a little experiment that I got off Johnny Lee to create a multi touch interactive white board using a wiimote, data projector and a PC.  You can check it out here if you haven't seen it before but it has been around for over two years now. 

Anyhow it took me all of one hour to get this thing up and running and it worked flawlessly with all my standard Smartboard applications and standard desktop apps. It killed my $5000 Smartboard with it's mutli touch capacity and cost a grand total of $100 to set up after the cost of the data projector.

When I did this I though wow some comapny is really going to latch onto this and run with it and we will see the end of ridiculously priced IWB's in the classroom and I really believed and still do that these will become a common household entertainment device.

Well over 2 years on - I personally haven't seen a single product that has replicated Nintendo's technology and applied it to Education.  There is an absolute fortune for the company that can get this right and get it on the market.

I am wondering if anyone has seen something similar on the market and I have just missed it or is their something more suspicious cooking here?

I would love to hear your feedback and for those that havent seen it yet below is a video of the $100 mutli touch Wiimote IWB in action.

Update on Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 11:34AM by Kevin Cummins

I just got a post from an anon user to check out http://www.wiiteachers.com/ it seems to have some commercial products available to support the wiimote IWB.  Thanks

Youtube XL - Whiteboard Friendly Youtube

I have already mentioned the benefits of unblocking youtube at schools if it is possible, but another the problem is that when you load it up on your Interactive Whiteboard it's full of advertising, cluttered and needs a bit of attention to get full screen footage in HD that you can watch with ease on a large screen. 

Well the good folks at youtube have released youtube XL which is specifically designed to be viewed on a large screen such as a projector or media center PC offerering HD quality as the default setting and no advertising or comments which means the screen can be mainly made up of the actual video itself.  Access it here.