Promethean ActivBoard 178 78-Inch Interactive Whiteboard

We bought two of these for our district. They're absolutely terrible. We are flatly unable to get them to work on one teacher's Macbook. We'll install the drivers, it'll work for a day, then stop. That board has been an expensive inert projector screen ever since. Multiple calls into the tech support yielded no success.The other used to work most of the time, though in every way they fall short of how easy and intuitive SMARTboards are. We recently suffered a failure on the second ActivBoard and let me tell you, the phone support is a mess. I don't necessarily blame them (though BEWARE: they don't have a toll-free!) but their troubleshooting is lengthy, annoying, has YET to fix the problem for us, and makes me pine for the simple simplicity and reliable usability of the SMARTboards.This is an inferior product. Buy a SMARTboard instead.

We have these in all of our classrooms at our small rural elementary school. They are so easy that my daughter began using them in KINDERGARTEN. That's right, KINDERGARTEN. Now my daughters' are in first and fourth grade and still use this technology on a regular basis. They have grown so use to it my eldest daughter just told me to download ActivInspire - a tool which allows notations electronically on various programs (such as ALEKS) so students don't have to drag around paper notebooks all of the time. This is a tool they learned to use via thier Promeathen Board.Some things our school has found:1) They need to mounted be securely and professionally; but once they are they are virtually indestructible. - 17 Kindergartens all day long prove that.2) You can't abuse the pens - it is true that the pens are touchy, our best fix is unscrew the top, blow off or out the dust and screw the top back on. Its good for students to learn respect for the pens, if a student abuses the pen they lose thier turn to be the leader and don't get to do the morning lunch count which is always done on the boards. The students love them so much they want to make good choices! These boards are such a privelage.3) Prepare your lessons in advance and find curriculums that have software easily loaded into your system. Our teachers use a Math program that comes with a disc that can be loaded, hence every single lesson can be done on the promeathen board and there is no need for scanning...Demand training from the district, go to your union if you need to and make sure the district gets all the same board. If you buy one here or there and try to integrate various types of boards and projectors from room to room it is going to be a nightmare.Write for a technology grant and get them all at once!

Someone in our district decided to switch from Smart interactive boards to Promethean. I cannot imagine how these folks at promethean are still in business. The whole Pen idea, almost invariably, breaks down within a year. The pens then become uncontrollable. They will spontaneously toggle between point tool and writing tool, so you have to constantly stop what you are doing to switch back and forth. This happens in every single classroom, with any laptop, and every single pen. This system is not designed to hold up to sustained classroom use.

We have around 30 of these in our district, and there seems to be constant problems with a lot of them. They are constantly not working, have to restart computer, unplug USB, also lose their sound a lot. There just seems to be a lot of problems. It is hard to get a hold of someone to help you fix them, and then when you do contact them, they troubleshoot by asking if you have tried board in a different room, or unscrew back of board to plug into main set of electronics, which is a little ridiculous that these are the solutions, considering board is heavy and awkward. I have seen a lot of problems with them, the pens are constantly not working, cost $80 to replace just the pen. It would be well worth your money to buy a SmartBoard instead.

Some moron in the school's administration thought it would be a good idea to replace all the chalkboards with these, Promethean Activboards.What a disaster it's been. They're very complicated, they're always broken, you're screwed if you lose the special "stylus" they give you, and the customer service is a disaster -- they never answer the phone. They basically sold a bunch of these to our school system and then skipped town, a lot like that monorail salesman from the Simpsons.They call it an "interactive whiteboard," but I'm not sure why. You can't use a normal dry- or wet-erase marker on it, so to write on it, you have to launch a bug-filled program that takes a long time to load and never seems to work right.Say you'd like to jot the word "Hi" down on the chalkboard. Using this disaster, you've first got to turn on the board, turn on the projector, fire up the computer, sign in on the computer, and then start up the program that will permit you to "write" on the screen. Total time to write the word "Hi": about 8 minutes.