SMARTBoard

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Home : 2001 : December : 15

SMARTBoard
By George

We've got a SMARTBoard in our computer lab. It measures about 5' wide by 4' tall. It's mounted on a rolling stand. A SMARTBoard looks like a whiteboard, but it has a touch-sensitive surface (I don't think you can write
on it with pens). You need a separate projector to use it as a computer screen.
Once you plug everything in to your computer, you turn on your projector and run a special program on your computer to orient the board. The program projects a grid of dots onto the SMARTBoard. You touch the dots one by one until you've touched all of them. Then, the computer knows where the board is in

relation to the screen you're projecting.

The SMARTBoard itself is not a monitor. It is just a surface on which you project an image. One big problem with this is that while you are writing you cast a shaddow on the board making it difficult to write or point to things. There are some SMARTBoards that have rear projection, which solves this problem, but I understand they are much more costly.