Mimio Xi

Whiteboard to Computer Screen Technology

The Mimio Xi has been designed with boardrooms, lectures and internet meetings in mind, but it has excellent applications for students with vision impairments. A capture bar is placed at the top left of the whiteboard and the teacher then writes with a stylus, which is a holder that fits whiteboard markers. When the marker is pressed onto the whiteboard the stylus emits a signal. This signal is received by the student's laptop, and writing or diagrams appear on the student’s computer screen at the same time as they appear on the board!

The captured screen can be saved, and the image can be viewed, or the session can be viewed in order of appearance on the screen.

An excellent feature of the mimio Xi software is that the background and line colours can be changed. Lines can be made thicker or thinner, and changes can be applied to all lines in the document, before, during or after saving. You can zoom in or out on any part of the screen.

But that’s not all!!! You can buy Optical Character Recognition software that can convert hand writing from the whiteboard into editable text, to be sent to a word processing document!!!

I trialed this technology with a year 10 student with extremely low vision, who is studying year 11 Mathematics Methods. Previously, she was only able to gain access to diagrams through an aide or fellow student scribing from the board, or by asking the teacher to redraw diagrams at her desk. The mimio Xi has allowed this student to view on her computer screen, exactly what is being drawn or written on the whiteboard, in real time. Her preferred screen set-up is black background, and bold, white lines. This is easy to set up on the computer.

My student finds it difficult to use the mouse in this application, because as the I-beam travels over her black screen, it turns into a black crosshair and disappears. The zoom feature is mouse driven; there are no key commands available for it, so she leaves the size original, and uses her hand held magnifier to see small detail. The “change background” and “change pen colour/thickness” functions are mouse driven as well, but the mouse is easier to find in these boxes. It is not possible to set the default up with preferred colours.

Even with these drawbacks, my student loves it. At first, the mathematics teacher was the only teacher to use it, but it is finding its way into all of the other subjects, as teachers find out how easy it is to use. The maths teacher loves it, and is happy to be quoted saying: “If I can use it, anyone can!”

Below: Screen capture of a maths lesson - appearance on the computer screen for a student who prefers white printing on a black background.

Written by Lea Nagel, Senior Visiting Teacher, Department of Education