ELHS staff voice their opinions regarding Smartboard replacements
ADAM DICKIE
Ms. Meier:
“I love mine, but some of my reasons are superficial! It’s colorful, you can have two students at a time at the board, it is portable, the fonts are easily adjustable. So as you can see I use it in one mode only: writing. A couple of features I don’t particularly like are the vertical keyboard, I haven’t requested a separate one, and I don’t have a DVR, so I can’t use my DVDs. It takes me some time to break in ‘new’ technology, but I do prefer it to the Smart Board, hands down.”
Ms. Garcia:
“The Clear Touch has better sound and video quality. It’s better to watch and listen on YouTube using the Clear
Touch board because it looks and sounds better. With the Smartboard, we also had to stop and calibrate it. There
aren’t any pauses like that with the Clear Touch. With the Clear Touch, I can switch colors easier and I can now
mirror my screen from my laptop or my desktop. One thing I wish I could change is the way I can see documents. As of now, I can save with the desktop side but I can’t save documents with the Android side. Overall, I’m happy with a
lot of the features.”
Mr. Bergeron:
“I’m finding I like the contrast. I like the different colors that you can emphasize certain things with. The only downside is that I could definitely use a bigger one. I’m using the chalkboard because sometimes I don’t have
enough space. It’s very helpful to be able to open up things online, open up documents, and I can hook up my document cam to it directly. I used the Smartboard very little before so I can’t say if one is better or not because I don’t know. I only used that for demonstrating a few things. When I first got it I was using it all of the time but now I’m starting to find that sometimes they just need to be able to see everything at once, so if it was a bit bigger and mounted that would be helpful.”
Ms. Petrillo:
“There’s some things that are positive and some things that are negative about them, as with everything. For math, they aren’t big enough. That’s the sentiment from every math teacher. They’re also kind of low. There’s been
a lot of glitches with it where I’ll write on a portion of the screen and it will jump to another portion of the screen
which is very annoying. I do like how it writes; it writes very nicely when it works. I like being able to open it up here and not have to open it up on my computer. The mounting system is a bit cumbersome. It’s out two feet from the wall which kind of makes it difficult for kids to see because it’s in the way of the board.”
