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Presentation Systems
Control Freak
6/1/2007
In fact, Harris spends much of her
time looking for and road-testing the
latest classroom technology. MTSU
spends nearly $5 million a year on
instructional technologies, and Harris
administers those funds; using them to,
among other things, try out new products
in a special classroom housed in the
school's Honors College.
"It's used as a showcase; kind of an experimental lab to introduce ideas to the faculty and the brightest students," she explains. The Honors College provides a "small university experience" within the 23,000-student MTSU campus, Harris says, "so we experiment. If we can introduce new technology in the Honors College, we can see where the demands are and introduce it into our regular classrooms."
Interactive Whiteboards: Morph and Dazzle
FOCUS ON THUNDER
PolyVision's Thunder takes the whiteboard concept and enhances it with a host of computing and collaboration capabilities. The digital flipchart accepts input from stylus, finger, or digital source, and controls multiple 'pages' that can be projected onto nearby walls. Images can be shared, annotated, saved, recalled, displayed, or e-mailed.
Last year, MTSU began testing PolyVision's Thunder Virtual Flipchart System, an innovative electronic whiteboard designed to accept input from just about any source, including laptops, scanned images, and video. The project was really something of a beta test, Harris says, because MTSU was the first university in the country to use the product.
POLYVISION'S THUNDER turns a presentation area into a wall of virtual flipcharts for collaboration.
"We were looking for cutting-edge technology," she says. "We wanted something that would encourage students to be actively involved, to do their own research, collaborate on that research, and then be able to bring it back into the classroom and share it. Thunder just makes that a natural."
The Thunder Virtual Flipchart System might be thought of as a super-interactive whiteboard, but execs at Suwanee, GAbased PolyVision prefer not to use that term and, indeed, it's fair to say that Thunder is a category-defining product.
"A whiteboard is a presentation tool," says PolyVision operations manager Gwen Dubois, who prefers to think of Thunder as a "global collaboration tool with presentation capabilities." She explains, "A whiteboard has one window of information, while Thunder provides multiple windows. It's really not the same thing at all."
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