A lot has changed in the world of Interactive Whiteboards since 2008. In fact, you could say the landscape has completely changed since last year. When I gave this course for the first time, there weren’t a lot of Interactive Whiteboards to choose from in Ireland. Essentially, you could divide your options in two; you could have a permanent IWB on your wall for around €6,000 or you could have a portable solution for about €2,500. The Internet was your only hope of resources if you didn’t happen to own a Promethean or Smartboard. Smaller companies were beginning to emerge but were hampered by exclusivity deals so no-one had really heard of them. The debate was: is it really worth spending an extra €3,500 on a permanent IWB solution?
This year it’s a totally different ball game. Permanent and Portable whiteboards no longer have a huge price gap between them. An average IWB only costs between €2,000 and €3,000 all in. There’s now LOADS of Interactive Whiteboard options available now in Ireland. You no longer need to use the software that comes with your IWB – you can now buy better software from Promethean, RM and other companies and ditch the software that comes with the original board. This has not only made life a lot cheaper for schools, unfortunately, it means choosing an IWB is a bit more complicated. On top of all this, the portable IWB solution reached an all-time cheap level with Johnny Lee’s WiiMote IWB costing only €50!
You can download the results of this year’s survey at the bottom of this post. However, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, I’ve been publishing my findings for the past week.
The findings from last year’s course showed that software was king and portable solutions were not sultions at all. This year the tale was the same and Promethean’s software was overwhelmingly voted as the best software for Interactive Whiteboards with over 84% of votes. Its closest rival was Notebook (from Smart), which got 12% of the votes. Other contenders for best software were the Interwrite and Starboard software. No other software was chosen by anybody.
In these troubling financial times, value for money is more important than ever and the results for the best value IWB were interesting. The participants voted the Traceboard (at €2,500) and the eBeam at (€2,000) as the best value for money, with 48% and 30% of votes respectively. The other boards that featured were Interwrite, Promethean and Starboard, despite the latter two costing the most!
Money aside, the participants voted for their favourite IWB to use. Last year the votes were overwhelmingly in favour of Promethean, which I attributed to its software. This year, with software no longer an issue, Promethean didn’t fare as well, although it did do ok. The stars of the show were the Hitachi Starboard and the Traceboard with 30% of votes each. The Smart Board came next with 22% of votes and the Promethean got 15% of votes. Only the Interwrite and 3M got any votes (1 each).
When buying an IWB, there are a number of considerations. I reckon the four factors in purchasing a board are: the price, the quality of the board, the after-sales service/warranty and training. The participants were asked to consider what was more important. The results showed that price and quality were the most important considerations and training was the least important.
I also asked participants about how important various factors were in an Interactive Whiteboard. There were 11 factors in total and some interesting things emerged. The strongest item to come out of the survey was that 86% of people said that they believed Interactive Whiteboard software needs to have a lot of resources in its library. 0% disagreed with this. (The rest were neutral). This is obviously bad news if you aren’t Promethean or Smart.
73% of people agreed that an Interactive Whiteboard should allow you to interact with your finger as well as a pen. I was really pleased to see this emerge because I have no idea why people wouldn’t see this as a HUGE factor. As much as I don’t mind using a magic pen to write on a board, it feels much more natural for me to move things around a board with my finger or hand. This statistic alone, I feel, should worry the eBeamers and the other pen-based board companies. Another interesting statistic was that 50% of people thought it was important that one should be able to write on an IWB using dry wipe markers; (23% disagree). I have no idea why one would want two separate whiteboards in their classroom.
Two other interesting stats emerged from the survey. 55% of people don’t believe that it is important to own a “top of the range” IWB. In fact, most people are quite satisified that a primary school simply needs a functional whiteboard. Nobody strongly agreed that you get what you pay for when it comes to IWBs, which was also interesting. In fact 68% of participants disagreed with this.
So, interesting research for this year and nice reading for those involved with Traceboards and Starboards. Promethean should also be satisfied that their software is still the number one choice but preference was shown for ActivStudio over ActivInspire because of the internal resource finder.
For me, I learned a few bits and pieces. Internal resources are deemed to be essential for any IWB software. The software must be attractive and look similar to Promethean’s ActivPrimary with big shiny buttons and cartoon-style interface. It doesn’t really matter what board one buys – it’s really like buying a car – everyone has their own preference and every board has its positives and negatives. The main thing I learned is that 2009 changed everything in the world of IWBs. There’s a lot more competition and a lot less money out there. Choosing an IWB is no longer a two horse race.
Download the 2009 Irish Interactive Whiteboards Survey
