Don’t put your whiteboard behind your projection screen

Daniel, Andrew, and I are on our second day of teaching, and like many places, Memorial Sloan-Kettering has all their classrooms set up with a whiteboard placed directly behind a projection screen. This gives us a sliver of space to write on without pulling the screen up and down.

If you have any say in setting up your seminar rooms, don’t put your board behind your screen, please — I almsot always want to use them both at the same time.

I also just got back from a DARPA workshop at the Embassy Suites in Portland, and there the problem was a podium in between two tiny screens, neither of which was easily visible from the back of the big ballroom. Nobody knows where to point when there are two boards. One big screen is way better.

At my summer school course in Sydney earlier this year, they had a neat setup where there were two screens, but one could be used with an overhead projection of a small desktop, so I could just write on paper and send it up to the second screen. And the screens were big enough that all 200+ students could see both. Yet another great feature of Australia.

9 thoughts on “Don’t put your whiteboard behind your projection screen

  1. I kind of like the whiteboard-behind-the-projection-screen. What I often do is *not* pull down the projection screen but project something – an empty table, a baseline graph – directly onto the whiteboard and draw/write over it.

      • But then every once in a while, someone writes on the screen by accident. That’s an expensive mistake.

        I agree with Bob: I prefer having the white board along side the screen.

        • +1 I’ve seen many a good screen ruined by that.

          Actually, why don’t they come up with a material that has the ideal properties for booth screen n whiteboard?

    • That would be better. It wouldn’t work here because the whiteboard only goes up to about 2 meters, whereas the projection goes up to nearly 4 meters. But my overall point is that I want to be able to see both. I want to project and then elaborate on what’s being projected. Not write over it.

      I once ruined an entire whiteboard at Cambridge Uni when someone handed me a permanent marker when I went off the slides to the board. I’ve read every pen handed to me since. It was only one side of a flippable board, so it may still be there!

      • You can clean the whiteboard by getting an erasable marker and tracing over the marks left by the permanent marker then erasing both. We salvaged a “ruined’ whiteboard in just that way. (True, that was 15 years or so ago, and maybe permanent markers have gotten more permanent.)

  2. The easiest solution for me is projecting over a whiteboard, as I can add items directly to my slides. This issue relates with the increasing tendency to hold conferences and workshops in hotels and “conference” centers, rather than universities, with the result that there is usually no board but a silly paper board no one can see and poor quality in the screen and projector strength so that most people cannot see properly the slides… Get conferences back to unis!

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