Interactive Whiteboards - Modern Presentation Technology

With fast and changing technology in this 21st centaury, presentation and interaction between individuals and groups has evolved from basically handing out notes to graphical presentation i.e. interactive whiteboards , with uses of graphics, sounds and videos to make the presentation more interesting and less time consuming to prepare. An interactive whiteboard is a touch-sensitive projection screen that allows you to control a computer directly by touching the board rather than using a keyboard or mouse.

An interactive whiteboard needs a multimedia projector and a computer to display. With the connection of the projector to either a pc or laptop, the displays are then seen on the interactive whiteboard which acts as a display screen. There are several different types of interactive boards but the two most popular are: pen (works on electromagnetic technology) and analog resistive (finger).

Computer interactions are usually carried out on the help of mouse, but with an interactive whiteboard you can touch the buttons and carry out functions without having to click on the mouse. The interaction on a white board is done with either the finger itself or a special pen. Interaction on a whiteboard is similar to the use of mouse where here the pen or finger acts as the mouse and the cursor follows with the pens or fingers movement and to perform a function you simply double tab on the desired section of the screen.

The finger touch sensitive whiteboards are ideal for use in the different sectors of buth education and business training environments which includes schools and colleges. The corporate and training organisations can choose the best type of digital whiteboard according to their needs. Medical environments usually use the finger touch boards such as dragging pictures or having other functions. Whereas Business environments tend to use finger touch boards for report presentations.

Interactive whiteboards are connected to the computer through either USB or a wireless network. The software device driver is usually loaded to the computer and then the board can be used with the pc and projector. Whiteboards come with built in OCR (optical character recognition) which means the characters you write on the screen can be recognised by the computer and be run as commands.