Take a look at these screenshots of GeoGebra. Now visit the GeoGebra WebStart page and click on the button (proper Java required). Amazingly this amazing piece of dynamic geometry software is not only free, but also runs without an installer, even under a standard user account. It will (optionally) create shortcuts and file associations for the pupil too. I’ve seen Java WebStart before and thought it was pretty nifty, but to be honest I’ve never really seen any truly worthwhile uses of it until now.

But that’s not all! You can even create web pages with your saved GeoGebra files preloaded into them (as in this GeoGebra example) – fully interactive worksheets with very little effort. There are more sites full of examples around the web, including these:

SLU.edu GeoGebra Applets (hard maths!)

Henrico County GeoGebra Applets (easy maths!)

For a school that has struggled through with Omnigraph for years and (I gather) tried some of the more expensive commercial oferings without luck, this is a real revelation. The large buttons make me think this could be a good tool for use on interactive whiteboards too.

Caveats & fixes

Unfortunately at the time of writing the author’s security certificate has expired. Depending on your settings this may cause some problems with the initial setup. Under Windows with Internet Explorer, try clicking OK to problems with the certificate. If you aren’t even given that option, put www.geogebra.at into your trusted sites list in IE, clear your cache and restart IE. As a network admin, you can add it to trusted sites for all or part of your domain via a GPO.

Yes, the picture is tiny. That’s because I’m too lazy to take one myself.

The basic idea is that you can have interactive whiteboard features without having to use a touch-sensitive board (and at a much lower cost). This means you can use it anywhere you can set up a projector and laptop (in theory! read on…).

Set up

You set this little (12.5 x 8.5 x 2.5 cm, 250g!) gizmo up in your room, pointing at the surface you are projecting on. Next, plug it into your PC/laptop USB port and press a button to bring up 2 red laser dots on your surface. The dots define the extent of the area you can work within, so typically you’d make it slightly bigger than your projector image. Assuming you’ve already got the driver installed on your computer, you just have to do a standard IWB clicking-on-dots calibration routine and you’re golden!

How it works

The pens you use have a small infra-red LED on the end (so yes, they take batteries – full specs here: CM2 Specs). As you press down with the pen (or use the button on the telescopic “wand” version) the LED flashes and the sensor device (shown above) tracks its location. The clever part is that the sensor can be at just about any angle to your surface and it will still work out where the pen is on your computer screen’s image. The pens have a right-click button as well, a la Promethean pens. The sensor even runs off USB power, which makes life much simpler if you want to mount it on your ceiling.

Limitations

Obviously, if you get between then pen and the sensor, it won’t be able to see what the pen is doing and you won’t be able to draw. That is a major problem if you’re using the comedy tripod shown, but when ceiling mounted (mount provided), we didn’t find it an issue.

The maximum size of your projection area is huge. They quote a figure of 150 inch diagonal (over 4 times the area of a large IWB!) Unfortunately, there’s a direct relationship between the size of the active area and the distance the sensor has to be positioned from the screen:

For a classroom, you’re looking at positioning the sensor around 2.7m from the wall (say) and that just isn’t always practical if you’re having to stand the little tripod up there. Again, ceiling mounted this isn’t usually a problem.

Batteries! I have no idea how long they’ll last, but there’s a law of physics which states that battery voltage decreases linearly with an increase in teacher stress levels (and vice versa). At least they’re cheap.

The software is a little basic to say the least. If you’ve used Promethean’s cut-down “Px” software – imagine a “lite” version of that. It also likes to crash if the user doesn’t have write access to its folder (the default if your users run as standard users rather than as admins). It covers the basics of annotation, but don’t expect anything fancy. For serious work, you’d probably want to license software from your usual whiteboard supplier.

Overall impressions

I was surprised. It’s one of those rare bits of technology that sounds complete turd when described to you, but does actually do the job quite successfully. The major failing seems to be in the way that it’s marketed. Rather than selling it as a portable whiteboard, OnFinity really should be pushing the CM2 as a low cost way to get interactivity – as a portable device it’s just too much of a pain in a classroom environment: one nudge from an inquisitive finger and your calibration is screwed.

Being able to write on a normal whiteboard with your choice of drywipe pens or the CM2 pen has got to be a bonus, making the facilities in a room more flexible for teachers with differing preferences and skills.

In short, I think we’ll be keeping ours. Including mounting it on the ceiling, it took about 30 minutes to set up and cost around 1/3 of the price of a similarly sized IWB – around £450 (not including the projector and PC).

As I’ve read in a few places around the web, it’s important to get to grips with which sorts of activites work well on an IWB and focus on those. The not-at-all-advertised Teacher Resource Exchange allows you to search for interactive whiteboard resources, but unfortunately it seems that a lot of the uploaders tag their resources as useful for IWBs when clearly they aren’t. I’m not sure how long that site will be available, as it’s part of the Virtual Teacher Centre (in turn part of the NGfL), which is due to close on 19 December 2005. As BECTA are involved, I’m not anticipating good things.

On a related note, there’s a new Australian Blog about the use of IWB’s in education: ActivBoarding. They’re using six (I think?) Promethean ActivBoards with ActivStudio. It looks like a good place to watch for a fresh perspective (most of the stuff I’ve seen is very UK-oriented) and interesting resources. It’s a shame there’s not an open/common format between the whiteboard programs (particularly between Smart, ActivStudio1 and Activstudio2) as being able to share flipcharts etc seems to be one of the key benefits of the IWB experience. We’re firmly in the Promethean camp at school, so I’ll be passing these links on to those that can’t when I return to work on Monday.

Still not sated?: There are more resources for Promethean ActivStudio users in the Promethean resource directory and at the Lighthouse for Education.

[via IWB-EFL, Teaching Generation Z]