Education: December 2012

Smart Whiteboard

		A Smart Board in Union City High School in New Jersey equipped with an overhead projector.


	Uses Uses for the Smart Board include teaching,training, conducting meetings, and delivering presentations. It has also been used on the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters. Using Smart Notebook software, teachers can record each step of a lesson activity for students to review at a later time. In Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work, Johndan Johnson-Eilola describes a specific computer-supported space for collaboration: the Smart Board. According to Johnson-Eilola, a “Smart Board [interactive whiteboard] system provides an... intelligent whiteboard surface for work” (79). Johnson-Eilola asserts that “[w]e are attempting to understand how users move within information spaces, how users can exist within information spaces rather than merely gaze at them, and how information spaces must be shared with others rather than being private, lived within rather than simply visited” (82). He explains how the Smart Board interactive whiteboard system offers an information space that allows his students to engage in active collaboration. He makes three distinct claims regarding the functionality of the technology: 1) the Smart Board allows users to work with large amounts of information, 2) it offers an information space that invites active collaboration, and 3) the work produced is often “dynamic and contingent” (82).

Disadvantages