Every section of the school seems to have its own preference when it comes to displays. The humanities classes upstairs all have the classic whiteboards, the math rooms downstairs turn to their blackboards, and the science department has chosen the Smart Board. The Smart Board isn’t a particularly smart piece of technology, they’re often slow, non-responsive, and laggy. Most importantly they’re rarely better than your choice of erasable board and a projector.

Now that’s not to see the upsides in using a smarter equivalent to the traditional classroom setup. For starters, having the whole lesson from class saved for anyone who was absent is a great way to allow them to catch up without additional work for the teacher. Also having a running collection of class notes could be useful when studying. 

However that’s not how we are using this software. In most of my classes that have Smart Boards, the notes are still split between the whiteboard and the screen, and on top of that, the notes that are taken aren’t saved and instead are erased just as they would’ve been on a normal board. A vast majority of the time the Smart Boards aren’t used for note taking at all and instead are used in the role of a projector. 

I think this is due to the Smart Boards interface being slow and hard to use. When you are writing, it doesn’t feel responsive., Tthe line lags behind the pen. In fact, almost every interaction with the screen is slow and discourages the user from interacting with it. If the screen is connected, you need an app to unlock the full notetaking and touchscreen capabilities, and switching between the inputs and Smart Board OS takes way longer than rolling up a projector screen would and causes impractical delays in class. 

Making simple modifications to the interface to reduce lag would enormously enhance the user experience of the display. In addition, adding features like notepads, where teachers could write and project their screen at same time, to combine the two main aspects of writing and projecting would go a long way to getting the most out of what this technology has to offer. Then we could add integration to the Portal so that at the end of class notes and screenshots of the lesson could be uploaded for later viewing.

On top of those basic upgrades, there is so much more potential for this technology. In a math class, you could have it so when you write an equation it automatically creates a graph. In a history class, you could easily combine images with the notes as you write them. In science class, you could have automatic conversions for units.

So while the Smart Boards might not be that smart right now, with some updates they could be a really influential tool in the classroom environment.