Google's giant 4K digital whiteboard, Jamboard, will cost $4,999

My experience is from using them in a number of German language courses at the Goethe Institut over the past seven years. They nicely replaced the functionality of whiteboards, overhead projectors, normal projectors, epidiascopes, and their modern equivalent document cameras.

- They are more efficient for changing and rearranging content compared to erasing and rewriting.

- Prepared content can be revealed incrementally in the same way overhead projectors are commonly used but the teacher is located and can stay at the screen. They can use their entire body to direct attention to the relevant portion of the content rather than the projected pen's shadow, giant fat fingers, mouse pointer, or a dancing laser point. I have no references but I suspect that attention direction in education is hugely important.

- Space savings because of low to zero time or effort to go from whiteboard functionality to it being simply another projected screen. Perhaps not important with institutions with large classrooms.

The Goethe smart boards are the overhead short throw projector type with a few pens and an eraser paired with a low spec, but good enough, Fujitsu desktop. The classrooms that I used are small but just about sufficient for class sizes of 10-15 people. The rooms usually have one or two other whiteboards which were usually used as single use per class extra space. E.g. top vocab to learn from that lesson etc. Here's an example classroom [0]

Every teacher and student struggled to some degree using the device because it is hard to know if you drawing or selecting something. Only drawing with pens and only selecting with hands helped a lot. Teachers who only used one or other tended to make more mistakes. The notebook and drawing overly software are good enough but a bit janky and inconsistent.

Only one teacher in my experience didn't really understand computers enough to not waste time searching for simple functionality. Most had little interest but were able to use basic drawing and selection functions. They were the most efficient users. A couple teachers might be described as power users and were delighted by the system. Unfortunately the more advanced features take more time to use. The inefficiency of the extra steps wasted about as much time as the computer-inept teacher overall.

I liked the content of the printed textbooks that we used. The digital versions were styled almost identically as a 2-up pages with inline links to the multimedia content. Unfortunately it had different page numbering and a very awkward zoom function to make the text legible which apparently had obviously never been tested other than with a mouse. Both problems disrupted the class briefly but regularly. The wasted time was still less than finding the right CD track or DVD menu for similar multimedia content let alone having the teacher leave the room to collect a CD player/computer/tv/whatever.

The 55 inch screen is a little smaller than the 4:3 projected displays that I used seven years ago. I believe both are too small. The larger area of a bigger screens used today, and presumably the 84 inch version, noticeably increases the amount of time that content stays on the screen before a new page or scrolling is required. When the screen is full the mind map is done! More space means more content.

The smartboard's brightness, contrast, resolution, and touch and pen tracking are all average to poor but they are all good enough that it doesn't matter. A fancy screen won't fix the UX problems.

Digital whiteboards might be sexed up by describing them as a fixed multi-user augmented reality overlay with direct tactile manipulation and no need for glasses. I think when we have good UX for augmented reality those capabilities will make the advantages of digital whiteboards obvious.

[0] https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/jpg457/3-Unterricht_Co...