
Google's giant 4K digital whiteboard, Jamboard, will cost $4,999 - artsandsci
http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/9/14863862/google-jamboard-4k-digital-whiteboard-price-release-date-announced
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mikeyouse
Has anyone ever found a good use case for a digital whiteboard? They've
existed for a decade or two and I've been in several organizations where we
had them -- but they were usually in the corner or behind a 'dumb' whiteboard
that we used instead.

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piceas
Smartboards are better than whiteboards anytime where direct interactive
manipulation and rearranging without rewriting adds value to the presentation
of the content. Education is the obvious example.

My experience is from using them in a number of German language courses at the
Goethe Institut over the past seven years. They nicely replaced the
functionality of whiteboards, overhead projectors, normal projectors,
epidiascopes, and their modern equivalent document cameras.

\- They are more efficient for changing and rearranging content compared to
erasing and rewriting.

\- Prepared content can be revealed incrementally in the same way overhead
projectors are commonly used but the teacher is located and can stay at the
screen. They can use their entire body to direct attention to the relevant
portion of the content rather than the projected pen's shadow, giant fat
fingers, mouse pointer, or a dancing laser point. I have no references but I
suspect that attention direction in education is hugely important.

\- Space savings because of low to zero time or effort to go from whiteboard
functionality to it being simply another projected screen. Perhaps not
important with institutions with large classrooms.

The Goethe smart boards are the overhead short throw projector type with a few
pens and an eraser paired with a low spec, but good enough, Fujitsu desktop.
The classrooms that I used are small but just about sufficient for class sizes
of 10-15 people. The rooms usually have one or two other whiteboards which
were usually used as single use per class extra space. E.g. top vocab to learn
from that lesson etc. Here's an example classroom [0]

Every teacher and student struggled to some degree using the device because it
is hard to know if you drawing or selecting something. Only drawing with pens
and only selecting with hands helped a lot. Teachers who only used one or
other tended to make more mistakes. The notebook and drawing overly software
are good enough but a bit janky and inconsistent.

Only one teacher in my experience didn't really understand computers enough to
not waste time searching for simple functionality. Most had little interest
but were able to use basic drawing and selection functions. They were the most
efficient users. A couple teachers might be described as power users and were
delighted by the system. Unfortunately the more advanced features take more
time to use. The inefficiency of the extra steps wasted about as much time as
the computer-inept teacher overall.

I liked the content of the printed textbooks that we used. The digital
versions were styled almost identically as a 2-up pages with inline links to
the multimedia content. Unfortunately it had different page numbering and a
very awkward zoom function to make the text legible which apparently had
obviously never been tested other than with a mouse. Both problems disrupted
the class briefly but regularly. The wasted time was still less than finding
the right CD track or DVD menu for similar multimedia content let alone having
the teacher leave the room to collect a CD player/computer/tv/whatever.

The 55 inch screen is a little smaller than the 4:3 projected displays that I
used seven years ago. I believe both are too small. The larger area of a
bigger screens used today, and presumably the 84 inch version, noticeably
increases the amount of time that content stays on the screen before a new
page or scrolling is required. When the screen is full the mind map is done!
More space means more content.

The smartboard's brightness, contrast, resolution, and touch and pen tracking
are all average to poor but they are all good enough that it doesn't matter. A
fancy screen won't fix the UX problems.

Digital whiteboards might be sexed up by describing them as a fixed multi-user
augmented reality overlay with direct tactile manipulation and no need for
glasses. I think when we have good UX for augmented reality those capabilities
will make the advantages of digital whiteboards obvious.

[0]
[https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/jpg457/3-Unterricht_Co...](https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/jpg457/3-Unterricht_Copyright_Goethe-
Institut1.jpg)

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Roritharr
I'm in the position to make my company buy it. I really would like to. But
Google's horrible history of dropping products shortly after release makes me
not even remotely consider this.

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draw_down
How do you suppose the customer service will be?

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johnsmith21006
I want one but not sure why.

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Ajedi32
It's a giant 4k touchscreen. What's not to want? ;-P

