September 19-23

This week we do a lot of problem solving with trying to determine what’s wrong with all the broken SMART boards (SB) in our schools. I have a SB that’s not working so I was involved in the whole process of contact the SB people and figuring out what was wrong with it. The SMART board company didn’t ship the boards directly to our school. We contracted a company to check all the SBs to make sure they were working properly when received from the company and ship them to our schools. If there was equipment lost or broken after the contracted company signed for the order, then SMART board company wouldn’t be responsible. This is why we had to figure out what was wrong instead of just calling and having new boards shipped. 

When you turn my board on, the cursor stays in one place. You can’t drag it around the board. We were told to calibrate the board again. This was not the issue. Since we can’t install or uninstall programs at our schools, the technology office personnel for our district came to check out the board. They thought there might be problems with the software or drivers on my computer. They decided to uninstall and reinstall on my computer and on a second computer. The board still had the same problem when hooked to both computers, so the problem wasn’t with the board.  When looking on my computer, the mouse moved fine and the software worked properly, it just wasn’t showing on the board. This led us to check the USB port. To check if this was the issue, we had to take a working USB port from another SB and replace it on my SB. This also didn’t make it work. Next, we decided to check out the SC9 unit (the touching mechanism). Again, we had to take apart from someone else’s board and try it out on mine.  After trying all these things, we didn’t know anything else to do. One of the technicians that installed the boards over the summer came to look at the board. He discovered the board must have been damaged when it was installed or delivered. If you look at the board in a certain angle in the right lighting, you can barely see where the board was hit. This made perfect sense as to why the cursor wouldn’t move and always stayed at the top of the part. Because of the dent, the SB thinks someone is touching it. That’s the reason why the cursor wouldn’t move from the damaged part. After all that, we finally have a shipment date for my new board. Now I’m just curious to see how long it will take for the people to come install it!