Interactive displays, panels, whiteboards, and many other fancy tech-driven names have been dominating the next wave of evolution of classrooms across the world and in India for more than a decade now. Interactive displays are becoming popular and a must-have for any school or college of repute that prides itself on the quality of education, student and learning-centric approach, and technology adoption.

There is a huge range of interactive displays for schools and classrooms that are available today, including manufacturers like ViewSonic, BenQ, Promethean, SMART Technologies, and of course Senses IIP which is the largest manufacturer of intelligent interactive flat panels in India, to name a few.

But finding the best-suited interactive whiteboard for your classrooms, schools or colleges can be a daunting task with the plethora of features that each of these manufacturers provide. It boils down to you to assess what features and functionalities are of utmost importance to your school, your teachers, staff, parents and students.

In this article, we look at the top 10 features that your smart panel must have to make your choice of intelligent whiteboards and your classrooms truly intelligent.

10 Interactive Panel Intelligent Features for Classrooms

1. Screen Recording

Screen recording is the first in our list of priority features. What good would all the technology be in your classroom and sessions, if your students or academicians do not have access to the same at a later date/ time?

If they still need to make notes and maintain mountains of paper, it does not leave quality time for teaching, interacting, experiencing or learning. Teachers must be able to record, save, replay, and share the entire lesson conducted on the smart digital screen with the audio and video files.

2. Cloud-based Teaching

If with all the bells and whistles your smart panel or interactive whiteboard does not have cloud-based teaching ability, you have built yourself a Jurassic Park. Teachers must be able to save, download, and share the classroom sessions on the internet cloud from anywhere using a common URL. This truly creates a holistic learning experience connecting teachers, students and parents where lectures, notes, classroom sessions can be accessed anywhere.

3. Support and Intelligent features for multiple disciplines

Your smart boards must have built-in features specific to key disciplines taught in your classrooms, like physics, chemistry, maths, English, etc. For example, with the Senses IIP you can write any complex equation and the Formula Recognition feature automatically solves the equation and gives the answer in a readable format. You can also solve graph functions, and equations, and simulate lab experiments enhancing practical learning. How cool is that as a teaching and learning experience! A must-have, otherwise you have just got yourself a touch screen larger than the smartphone on your hand.

4. Ability to access the internet and the ability to control access to the same

We all know that every lesson or chapter today is just a search engine and a click away on the internet. And more than that no classroom can accumulate all the resources that is available online on any given subject. The internet is the biggest source of knowledge and learning and at the same time the biggest risk to structured learning. With all the pros and cons, this is a must-have feature. With the Senses IIP teachers can not only access and drag any educational content available online directly onto the teaching Canvas, they can annotate as well. The video content can be paused and zoomed alongside too.

5. Collaboration features and interactive learning

In a student-centric classroom and learning-focused teaching methodology, it is imperative that your smart panel/ interactive whiteboard should allow collaboration and interactive communication between teachers and students. With the Senses Connect feature, multiple users can share/mirror and compare their presentations. You can mirror a Windows screen to the Senses IIP and share up to 4 desktop screens at a time.

6. Endless Canvas/ pages

Teachers should be able to write endlessly on the smart board without erasing. New pages should be automatically created, and you should be able to refer old pages anytime during the session. This is an excellent feature to have that allows uninterrupted, smooth and continuous teaching sessions. And coupled with the auto email feature that can record the entire classroom session and instantly share the same, we have the most effortless state of the art learning delivery system on our hands.

7. Multi-language recognition

We live in a global world today and learning technology should not be limited by languages in different regions. Training, classes and resources should be usable in as many languages as possible. Your interactive smart panel or whiteboard must be intelligent enough to provide you this feature. Senses Interactive Intelligent Panel supports multiple languages for education like English, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, etc.

8. Multiple-finger gesture recognition and control

Your smart panels must support multiple-finger gesture recognition and control. You should be able to pre-configure and customize finger gestures for a seamless classroom delivery. With Senses IIP teachers can draw, select, drag, rotate, and erase by using the 61 multi-point touch gesture control like palm erase, double click to change pen color, long press, multi-finger swipe etc. That makes teaching interesting and tech agnostic.

9. Text Recognition and shape recognition

Your smart and intelligent interactive whiteboards must be able to recognize the text or shape written or drawn on the Canvas automatically and convert it into the most accurate and readable format. We all know how difficult it was for teachers or students 20 years back to draw accurate circles on the boards.

10. Voice Recognition

In our list of must-have features although this is the last feature listed, this is one of the most interesting and coolest features to have. Why would you or your teachers want to write or keep on standing to deliver classroom sessions?

They should be able to use simple and effective voice commands and your intelligent panel should be smart enough. For example, Senses IIP recognizes more than 200+ voice commands and converts them into text, like dictation, draw shapes, open a tool or go to the menu, search in google, open files, etc.

This is our list of the top 10 features that every interactive whiteboard for content delivery in classrooms must have. Having said that this is just the beginning. The hardware features are of paramount importance which we will cover in another blog. Let us know what according to you is the most important, smart and intelligent feature you would like to have in your classroom whiteboards or panels?

To watch a video of what an intelligent interactive panel must be like and the features it must have watch the video below