Well, you could. It wouldn't hinder the process much. It would just be icky.

Yes, it's as tiring as directing an orchestra.
I've done both.

Some ideas sound good at the time but tend not to work on closer observation. I read an article decades ago about a study the military commissioned to try to find a faster method for moving artillery pieces to the correct angle for firing. They decided the wheel was still the best.

It seems cars still have steering wheels after all these years (though Google would like to replace the steering wheels and the people drivers).

At this stage of my life, I'll admit that I'm getting fatigued with changes in user interfaces. Do we really need a Ribbon? I thought having the Auto-Ripple button on the bottom might be cool until I hit it by accident a few times reaching for something on the Windows Task Bar.

If we didn't have and user interface changes, I wouldn't have anything to do.

I loved the movie, and when I saw it, I thought it would be a cool way to edit. But as mentioned, many of us are editing all day and all week. To do what Tom Cruise was doing would be a bit too much wear and tear on our arms.

The biggest issue I had with smart boards is the projector. When between it & the board you can't project on the board (and thus can't do something on the board in front of people). The bulbs still die out fast.

Our school is getting almost every room with one now. They're ~$5k each. You can (well, could) get a touch screen monitor ~that size for ~$3k. It last longer. Doesn't need special software to run. Keeps it's brightness a lot longer. $2k cheaper.

But hey, someone has the corner market in "cool" and is making a killing selling devices designed to last two or so years to a school system that doesn't plan for any kind of long term maintenance. It's like gold to the smart board companies.

i have a 23" touchscreen monitor on my main computer. I like it. I use it in Vegas to draw my envelopes, do my mask points & the like. I draw images with it. I use it like I thought I would.

EDIT: the thing that drives me crazy with the smartboard tech is that it's the same tech behind the Wii controller pointer. Nothing advanced about it one bit. A projector projects on a standard white board & you set your limits via the software. That's the ONLY difference between that & a normal projector and computer. I wish I would take some decade old tech & put a new bell on it and sell it to a entity that just gives themselves a raise when they want more $$. :p

It is a good point about getting tired arms. We tend to forget that when using the normal Vegas interface, the hand only has to move the mouse a scant couple of inches at any time max, and even that can become tiring if you work at it all day.

Yep, the Smart Board tech is way overpriced. Now that we've had them for over 2 years and the lamps are burning out we're finding it more cost effective to replace their lousy projectors with new Epsons. The Powerlight 480 is an almost drop-in replacement for the SB UF55 & 56. Epson has far superior tech, higher resolution, brighter image, and much, MUCH cheaper lamps. The UFs need a lot of ongoing maintenance, including regularly cleaning the bearings of the color wheel. (Yes, you read that right, a color wheel. I didn't believe it myself until my boss took one apart to show me!) All the new purchases will be with the Epson projectors to start with.

My boss is convinced that the only reason Smart got into so many schools over all the other less expensive brands is because the entered the market with the name "Smart" and sold themselves on the "educational" image that portrays.

goodness, i just get tired waving my arms in despair at my clients ;-)

Kelly, the reason smart boards got such a foothold in the schools is they gave thousands of them away through grants, rebates, and promotions. I took possession of two when they first came out, assembled, and trained the faculty. Trouble was, only one teacher wanted one in his room. There were no good assembly and operating instructions at that time, and the person who had demoed them for us was long since gone.

My experience is they just get relegated for use as a giant white board; just running thirty feet of cable is too much for most staff to bother with.

Most of them in these two schools (probably 60 boards total) are used most of the time. Seems like the high school teachers use them mostly to display online text books, while the elementary teachers use them for grammar & spelling drills and free-time entertainment. However, we did have one new teacher start this summer who asked if the board in her room could be moved to someone else who would use it. We've got 8 new ones on state & local grants we'll be installing before September.

We got 4 more today and have 7 more on the way.

I know we're talking about costs & in reality the school doesn't necessarily pay, but it's almost always funded by taxpayer $'s, so it's just out of one pocket instead of the other.

I like to joke that we went invented nuclear power & went to the moon with a slide rule, not a computer or smart board. :)