Sweet Spot

So, usually I post potential solutions to problems. But this is a problem too juicy to pass up. http://www.43folders.com/forum/2008/01/27/teachers-productivity-hampered-technology-no-love describes a teacher who is reduced to using whiteout to fix worksheets because the district has the machines locked down with none of the needed software. Also note the ancient commercial software the school still runs. What to do? I’m guessing the solution might be a social hack more than a technical one… 

So, yet again we had somebody suggest taking a digital photo of a whiteboard with their cell phone at the end of a meeting, rather than laboriously copying down the contents.Why not just invent a gizmo that is built into the room to do this task well? CCDs are so cheap now, and I have a few old, semi-broken digital cameras, how hard can it be to make a box that simply attaches to the ceiling in the room and is dedicated to allowing people to share/archive/print their whiteboards? In the old days, this kind of smartboard technology was really expensive, but given our ubiquitous wifi, it seems like a specialized version of a webcam that should be very cheap to produce.One challenge that seems solvable is the optics. Someone should be able to design a little plastic lens that corrects for the keystone effect if the camera is ceiling mounted.  I would have to think through the design implications for how to get this to the right participants and only the right participants. Maybe it just has a certain web address that you go  to, and it gives you a high-res slow speed pic of the board. If you’re security minded, how about just putting a little remote control next to the board, with a green button for “take a pic” and a red button for “erase”, and then only if you go to the correct web address before erasure would you get the digital board image. A console into which you type an email address might also work but would require more hardware. Oh, I know–how about you plug in a USB stick, and it simply dumps the image file directly on the stick when you press a button. No wifi required there, just a cable from the ceiling to the console. Better still–a device where the console is the camera, and sits on the table as an all in one.  Final idea–what if you integrated this tabletop whiteboard snapper into the portable digital projector? So somebody’s infocus projector would also take snaps of the whiteboard for your USB stick. That would be neat.