In the technological world things are constantly changing. Things have to be cutting edge all the time. In education we have the struggle of always having the newest and greatest. Often times there just isn't the money that is needed for upgrading all the time. With such money resrictions it is important to get the best for your money.
Interactive whiteboards are a great assets to education. Leading the market are Smart and Promethean but coming up quickly behind is Mimio. Our school choose to trade in our smartboards so that we could afford to get a mimio in every classroom, seeing how Mimios are less expensive. I love my Mimio and use it everyday, but when challenged about its greatness in comparison to Smart and Promethean I started thinking. The fact was brought up that the software that runs on the Mimio is not nearly as advanced in the educational frame of things. Mimio is starting to break into the education world where as Promethean and Smart have been there for a while. It was also brought up that Mimio software couldn't possibly be a good because it hasn't had an update in almost six months. So that brings up my question: Is a Mimio (which in every way but the software "better" than others) not the way to go because it simply doesn't have updates often and because the software doesn't have the bells and whistles that the other software programs have for educators? How often should a program require an update to be considered a good use of money. I know that on my iPhone I am always having to updat appliations and it gets frustrating when everytime I turn around I am having to update something new. At the same time though I don't want something that is going to go out of date because they lack the update.
Here are links to see and compare the two products for yourself.
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Excellent comment. We were just talking about this between the program professors when Screenflow was updated, but the update wasn't free. I guess an important way to assess whether one wants to invest in a company and buy their products is how frequently do they do update and are they free? Some of the program CDs were bothered by too frequent updates, but as a someone who has been doing for a while, it's generally a good sign to have frequent updates. Maybe that another difference between the Ed market and the general tech market, Ed tends to be "get it and forget it."
ReplyDeleteI have been asking for a Smartboard for last two years at work and am patiently waiting to be next on the list. Our school has decided to buy a few each year. I hadn't heard Mimio until I read your post and am excited to look into this option. It's particularly interesting to look into this tool after reading your and Professor Bustillos thoughts on the subject of updates as I will have more information to be aware of going into this investigation, thanks for posting this!
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It has gotten to the point that we no longer update any of our software unless there is a good reason to. We have been burned too many times by updates that made things worse than before we updated. For example, when we were on OS 10.5.5 we never had any problems. Then 10.5.7 came out and computers started crashing and students couldn't log in. Then 10.5.8 came out and it was a disaster. We HAD to upgrade to Snow Leopard because there was no way to go back to 10.5.5.
ReplyDeleteThis happens with apps too. We use Roxio Toast for many things. Ver 8 was great. We could use it to convert video from any format to any format. When 9 came out we lost that function.
When Quicktime Player for SnowLeopard replaced QuickTime 7 Pro we lost many features also. The problem is that you never know till its too late. With the last upgrade to Snow Leopard 10.6.2 almost 1/2 the mice in my lab stopped scrolling down. Worked fine before the "upgrade".
There's a real art to managing the upgrade (software, hardware, Operating systems) when you are dealing with whole computer labs, whole school sites and whole districts that individual users cannot begin to appreciate. It's like mending a thread in a tapestry, you make one error and the whole thing will come apart. Update the OS and you need to update the hardware and the software, and on and on. I remember hearing the complaints that we weren't upgrading some piece of software, even though the upgrade was relatively inexpensive (under $20). I'd get the "deer in the headlights" reaction when I tried to explain that we needed to buy a copy of the upgrade for every computer in the labs. Which meant that the cost went from "inexpensive" to $1,600 for two computer labs. I don't know about you, but our school(s) never had that kind of cash lying around. Ack.
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