Page 10 - THE Journal, April/May 2017

FEATURE |ED TECH TRENDS
10
| APRIL/MAY 2017
AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTS CHANGE with the season. Trying
to stay up on AV is like capturing the right height of boots or the correct length of facial hair. However, if what was shown during a recent series of education technology conferences was any indication, new trends are driving the market right now for projectors and displays. Here’s what to consider as you draw up your AV plans.
Whiteboards Giving Way to Flat Panels
Colin Messenger, a senior market analyst with a focus on education at FutureSource Consulting, said that over the last two years K–12 technology has shifted from the use of interactive whiteboards to the use of interactive flat panels. In 2014, the split
in education worldwide was 89 percent interactive whiteboards and 11 percent flat panels. “That has changed massively,” he said. Now the figure is 62 percent interac- tive flat panels and 38 percent whiteboards.
Interactive displays are showing impressive improvements with fast and accurate hand- writing recognition, easy browser input,
a proliferation of education apps (often available through in-platform app collections), image capture, quick creation of new pages and sharing with multiple devices. “All this, in the hands of a skilled operator, can be done i n seconds and be compulsive viewing,”
stated FutureSource in a recent report. Several companies have adopted FlatFrog In- Glass technology for their high-end offerings, to improve writing precision and the ability to take input simultaneously from finger, pen, eraser or palm. On top of that, screen sizes are going up; bezels widths are going down (thereby expanding view size); and prices
are dropping.
Even companies that made their K–12 mark with interactive whiteboards have gone into the flat panel business. Recently, Promethean began showing off its new ActivPanel v5 interactive flat panel series; and Smart has launched two new lines of displays and expanded its flagship 6000 series. But the move is also drawing new companies with heavy stakes in the LCD
display market — Sharp, Samsung, NEC, LG and Dell, for example.
And the market could experience ad- ditional upheaval soon. One of the world’s largest contract manufacturers, Foxconn Technology, which produces iPhones for Apple, acquired two of the major compa- nies in the segment, Sharp and Smart, in 2016. As Chris McIntyre-Brown, associate director of professional equipment for Fu- tureSource noted, “Nobody’s really entirely clear how that’s going to play out.” One prediction he offered: that Foxconn will “leverage” the LCD background of both companies to produce a mass-scale product that can run Smart education software and sell it into Smart’s broad school and district customer base.
McIntyre-Brown doesn’t expect strategic deal-making between display makers and education brands to end anytime soon. “There’s a lot of scrambling around for creating partnerships,” he explained. “We are beginning to see new factories come online [to produce] next-generation LCDs and capable of producing super-large LCD screen sizes.” When he talks to product managers to understand where large-screen opportunities are for their companies, “Edu- cation is always one of the first spaces that people talk about for commercial LCD.”
Focus on Projectors
Interactive flat panels are also eating into the interactive projector business, Future- Source suggested. As Messenger pointed out, the initial cost of the displays may be more expensive, increasing the capital outlay of outfitting a district’s classrooms. “But
as opposed to the projector-based system, there is very little maintenance that needs to be done.” That means the total cost of ownership “is about the same” over the seven- or eight-year lifetime of the product.
However, that doesn’t mean projector makers are giving up. Lampless projectors are coming to the forefront, eliminating the hassle and expense of changing lamps every 3,000 to 4,000 hours of use. These devices combine lasers and LEDs, eliminating
the use of components that have mercury, running cooler and on less electricity and
reducing maintenance to nearly nil. The result is a projector that can run without the burden of bulb replacement for upwards of 20,000 hours, the equivalent of 13-plus school years (assuming annual operation on 185 eight-hour days).
Where interactive projectors excel, ac- cording to FutureSource, is in spaces that need ultra-wide or ultra-large projection for multi-user participation. Epson, for instance, has begun showing “DuoLink,” which allows the teacher to put dual ultra-short-throw projectors side by side, to generate a wide, blended screen with interactive features.
The decision regarding which interactive direction to head — projector, whiteboard or flat panel — “depends on the district or school where the purchasing is happening,” McIntyre-Brown said. “There’s still a place for everything at the moment.”
A Case in Point: How a Georgia School System Decided
Given the number of AV options available for schools, just how does a district choose the right solution?
Tim Dunn, director of operational IT program management, leads a team of project managers and business analysts that execute the technology projects
for Fulton County Schools in Georgia.
In a two-year implementation project
that ended just last fall, Dunn and his group oversaw a massive deployment of AV in every academic space except for gymnasiums — a total of 6,453 projectors.
The project began when the district decided it was time to take decision-making out of the hands of individual schools, which tended to do their shopping based on “the best deals they could find locally.” Prior to 2014 the school system had a “hodgepodge” of technology in its class- rooms: a variety of projectors, dry-erase boards, interactive whiteboards, student re- sponse systems “and everything in between.”
“It became a support challenge for us,” recalled Dunn. “When there was an issue with that equipment, the school did not have enough savvy to negotiate things like warranty and break fix support and those kinds of things. So they’d call into our