Podcast with Clevertouch – Latest Products, Future of AI and Arranging Demos

PRITESH (HOST): Hi, and welcome back to another episode in our podcast series from Classroom365. I’m your host, Pritesh. Don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons. Today, we’ll be talking to our partners over at Clevertouch, Sam and Ryan, who will explain how you could use your interactive screens to do a whole lot more than you thought was possible. Let’s go!

PRITESH: Hello, and welcome to another edition of our podcast at Classroom365. Today, our guests are Ryan and Samantha from Clevertouch, whom we’ve worked with for a while. Samantha and Ryan, do you want to introduce yourselves?

SAMANTHA: Hi, everyone. So I’m Samantha Janse Van Rensburg. I’ve been with Clevertouch for up to seven years now, working as a Business Development Manager, and I manage the relationship with Classroom365, and that’s my role.

RYAN: Hi, my name is Ryan Stapleton. I’ve been with Clevertouch for as long as Sam and I work on the education team. I’m a former teacher, so I work with schools to show how the screens work and what the software can do. I work as a consultant, so I can answer any questions about our ecosystem.

PRITESH: We’ve definitely lent on you a lot in the past, right? And it’s definitely good to have a teacher from a teaching background helping us to support selling the boards and supporting the schools. So, just going back to where we first started to collaborate, I think it was under a different branding. I think it was Mimio. Wasn’t it about six or seven years ago? Then Clevertouch bought Mimeo out?

SAMANTHA: So what happened is our parent company now is Boxlight. Clevertouch is a brand that has been around for about 15 years. Our company, Sahara AV, sits in the background. We had our 100th year anniversary this year if you believe it. We didn’t make touchscreens back in the 1920s, but for however long, we did make typewriters, I believe, locally in London. I think it was in the 1970s that we moved into AV distribution. Sahara launched its brand, Clevertouch, 15 years ago, which was the first touchscreen to market globally, if I’m not mistaken, and the first to have Android. So we’ve been a pioneer brand for a long time, but what happened was the brothers who owned the brand decided to retire. So the Boxlight group came and created Clevertouch as a brand. Mimio was part of Boxlight’s offering, but now they took on Clevertouch. I know you were dealing with Mimio, and that was a wonderful introduction for us. That’s how we started engaging with you.

PRITESH: Having been in the education sector for about 14 years, I remember seeing a lot of Sahara boards back in 2009. And then a lot of Clevertouch boards as well. And then, Mimio and Boxlight came in, and it was rebranded to Clevertouch. I think Clevertouch is a name that everybody has known for a long time in the industry. I think that was a pretty good move. You’ve not looked back.

RYAN: Nowadays, you still see the old Sahara board around when you enter a school, which is a testament to their longevity. I think we still, as Sam mentioned, believe that innovation is one of the things you’ll find in our screens, which is that we tend to introduce features into a screen before other manufacturers do. So, we are always ahead of the curve in terms of those innovations for classroom technology.

PRITESH: We had the Mimeo boards previously compared to what we can offer schools now. They have come a long way in a short space of time. I think the important thing here is that Clevertouch has gone to length to ensure that the operating systems and the platforms used in schools, such as Google, Office365 and OneDrive, are compatible. I think that’s important because it gives people a sense of security that they can access their work from the computer and as a standalone device. We’re hearing a lot of this now. Teachers want to work on the computer, but they also want the flexibility of the boards. Ryan, you’re key in this because anybody can do a sales pitch, but when you have someone from a teaching background going in and seeing exactly how an interactive board fits into day-to-day teaching, it gives people a new sense of security, which they buy into.

RYAN: As a brand, we’re very agnostic regarding our linkage with other manufacturers. So, we work with all your connections, and integration works well from a software perspective. It doesn’t matter what your school is doing now; our technology will fit seamlessly into that. And I think you’re right. We have conversations regularly with schools about this. My background is that I was a school governor. I was also in the SLT in the school and part of the leadership team as IT manager and ICT coordinator. So it’s helpful to have all those different hats in a school. Sometimes, you fall into those roles, but it was really good having that experience, and it means that when you’re having conversations with people in schools, you are aware of their interest in a particular technology and their particular view on the technology. Somebody like a school business manager will have a completely different perspective from a teacher in the classroom who uses them on a day-to-day basis. So you’ve got that daily use and how it integrates into teaching. As a teacher, I want to be able to turn it on and have it work.
I also need software to engage the kids. Are you looking at it from the perspective of a school business manager regarding the return on investment? How long is this going to last? How long is the warranty? You need all of those different factors to come together.

SAMANTHA: To add to what you’ve said, we’ve always, as a brand, been well-known in the industry for investing heavily in people. You’re not just selling technology and leaving people to figure it out themselves. And we take a very consultative approach. So we’ve got a large end-user team, ex-teachers, people who know about the environments they’re in. They’re going there, consulting and helping your schools make the right decisions. How do you work? Okay, let’s position our product and show you how it can work for you. Here are some ideas on how you can work, and then we can provide that extra support in terms of training after user adoption. Ryan’s gone back on multiple occasions to train teachers. Sometimes, they just want to learn 20 per cent of it and get their heads around it. He’ll go back in six months and do a bit more. That has always worked well for us as a business model.

PRITESH: So, for anybody who’s listening to this, and hopefully people are listening, what can they do? So they approach us.
What steps can we take next to get them comfortable with the boards, try them out, and learn more about them, not just from pamphlets and speaking to us as an IT team? I know you guys are very supportive when it comes to us introducing boards. So, what kind of support can the school expect?

RYAN: We can initially talk with the school to determine their requirements. It’s always useful to know what they’re doing now because you need to ensure they’re in the right place going forward. To introduce new technology, many schools are moving from one brand of panel to another. It may be moving from one model of Clevertouch to a more updated one, or you could even be moving from an interactive projector to a touch screen. So there’s a lot to think about from a school perspective and the impact on the users in the school, especially the teachers who use them daily. We can have conversations with the schools and determine what they have and want to achieve. Then, we will show them the different options that we have. We have different models of interactive touch screens, and depending on your school, different models will be suitable. From that point of view, we could arrange for a demonstration screen to come to your school. We can then send that, and you can have one for a week or two, even longer if you need it. We can have that conversation, and then we can go to the site and demonstrate it to you during that time. We often think schools aren’t unaware of the digital signage element of screens. So that’s something that’s incorporated into all the Clevertouch screens. Schools often pay for signage separately, which they wouldn’t need to do if they had the Clevertouch screen. Information like fire alarms, messaging, parent information, and open days can all be displayed.

SAMANTHA: We have a demo fleet of products we can deliver nationwide. As Ryan said, we always have someone requesting a screen and having a demonstration. We do push demos because seeing is believing. When you look at a spec sheet, everything looks the same, but once you have these screens physically in front of you, you can see what they can do. What is the performance like? There’s nothing worse than a lag if you are trying to get things done. It’s like having a decent smartphone and a cheaper model; you can tell the difference. We encourage people to have that demonstration and get the experience. Then, you can see the value of the products. We also offer remote demonstrations if people don’t have time to have a physical screen onsite. Our team can do that if schools want a taster session. Again, we can facilitate all of that.

PRITESH: We have used all those options in our schools, and I can testify that this is accurate and correct. Our schools have many interactive boards and use Clevertouch in their classrooms. Ryan, you are key in that as well, doing the demonstrations, answering any questions, and going onsite to do the demos. We have also had remote demonstrations of the digital signage. We are also, which we haven’t spoken about, using the device management option, which is an MDM for Clevertouch boards. This is something that doesn’t get spoken about much. It’s brilliant for managing user accounts and flashing signage across the boards. We’ve even got teachers who are users on the MDM so that they can also put signs up. You can group it so that only signs go to year 6, or they only go to the nursery classrooms. It’s so versatile. This is something that surprises many people, that you can do this. All the boards talk to each other, and you can manage it centrally. So, from an IT and administration perspective, it minimises the amount of walking around we have to do. It’s not so good if you’re counting your steps, but it’s good for central management. You don’t have to go to every board, which works in a multi-academy trust level.

RYAN: If you are looking at an opportunity for a trust, anyone can come and see our London showroom. The whole ecosystem is really clever for room bookings, digital signage and totems. If you are a multi-academy trust, you can use the MDM and digital signage to manage content that goes to all your different screens across multiple sites.

SAMANTHA: You can create a policy and remotely apply it to all your screens. That’s really handy. The CleverMDM is included with the hardware along with our LYNX lesson creation software, which I’m sure we’ll speak about in a moment. There is no ongoing subscription for the signage and LYNX.

PRITESH: You do more than touch screens. You have screens for foyers and small screens that you can put outside your meeting rooms and integrate with your calendar. So, you can have room booking facilities as well.

SAMANTHA: Yes, the room booking links into your Microsoft 365 and Google Calendar, and it’s also an endpoint for digital signage. So, content can be scheduled around the school for your touch and non-touch screens. Say it’s a sports day next Friday; content can be changed to show relevant content, etc. The digital signage is really powerful, and last year, we won the best signage platform award at the AV Awards, so it’s a great standalone product. So you can buy a little media player even for schools with existing screens, and they’re not yet looking to upgrade. Clevertouch screens and the screen on reception can be managed by CleverLive software for the signage.

PRITESH: As you just said about the media player, if there are schools that don’t have the budget to go fully upgraded and change all of their boards, there is a bolt-on option, isn’t there? Schools can still benefit from using the Clevertouch operating system and everything it offers.

RYAN: We have a LUX Mini module, which works with older screens to convert to a Google EDLA-certified screen. So, depending on which version of Clevertouch you use, you will have an upgradeable path.

SAMANTHA: In terms of the digital signage media players, those can be attached to any non-touch panel.

PRITESH: And the teaching software, LYNX, I’m glad you went on to that. To make this relevant to teachers who may be listening or decision makers in schools thinking about which direction they want to go in next. As Ryan is aware, as we work closely with Ryan and yourself, Samantha, we now have trusts and schools using LYNX. LYNX is very versatile. All the teachers can use it at home, and then they can save stuff, and then they can come into the school and sign into LYNX on the boards. They can access all their planning slides and lesson plans that they’ve made. Do you want to talk more about that, because I think it’s a great product?

RYAN: I will. I used a few different versions of competitor software as a teacher. Some feel very fluid, and some feel quite clunky. LYNX Cloud is definitely in the more fluid category. It feels really intuitive to use it. It can be installed on any device. You can install it on teacher laptops and the screens themselves. You can install it on pupil devices, too. I don’t want to encourage teachers to work at home, but they can also install it on their devices at home. They can hook it up to their Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Dropbox. That means that they can access their files from any web-enabled device. You can create a lesson at home, and then once you save it to a cloud account, you can access it from the screen. It has so many different benefits, even things like a PPA cover, that you can have a folder for them waiting on the screen. The teacher can walk into the room, open an app and access the content you’ve created for them to use in a cover session. So it’s really useful software. It has so many different applications in a lesson. We can open competitor software in there. So, things like ActiveInspire, if you have any Promethean software files you’ve created or any SMART Notebook files, Google Slides, and PowerPoint presentations, All of that kind of content can be opened within LYNX itself. Then you’ve got the tools built into LYNX to use over the top of that. We provide free training because it’s sometimes a bit of a shift in working patterns for teachers, and having introduced new software at schools, I know what a battle can be like in school sometimes. Our training packages are all bespoke. So we ensure your school is catered to get the maximum out of the software products and the features in LYNX, including things like the interactive maths tools. We have a load of bolt-ons, so we’re looking at things like the manipulatives you use on your table with maps and place value counters. All those kinds of concepts that teachers would use as physical objects on the table the kids would use. We have a physical representation on the screen that matches what is on your table. It creates a real link between the classroom and the kids. They can see what they’re using, and you’ve got the option to share that kind of content. You can then share it with Google Classroom, put it into a Team’s Room, and put QR codes on the screen so the kids can scan them from their devices, download the files, and play them themselves. There’s a world of possibilities with LYNX. There are some more creative colleagues than myself. If teachers are looking at your content, we’ll get them to send some stuff to us. My design skills aren’t brilliant, but there are things we can share with schools, and when you go into a classroom, and they are looking for a new screen, you can say here’s the software! You’re looking at a bar model, and you can tap it. You can change the numbers. You just saved me an hour’s work of creating that. And that, as an ex-teacher, makes a real difference to your job because you can see the impact that will have. Because if you are that person who sits there looking for a particular thing for an hour, whereas if somebody’s made it for you and gives it to you, it’s great.

PRITESH: One of the case studies, which is an actual live case study, was one of the trusts we look after, they were using ActiveInspire. One of the big issues was that they had all these slides and lesson plans made in the past. What’s going to happen to all of them? We were able to use LYNX. You can open them up easily because there’s not a lot of cross-compatible software compared to LYNX. They were also able to use LYNX at home and then come into school and open the lesson plans. ActiveInspire, they found, was quite restrictive. It’s also very resource-heavy, so you need to have pretty decent hardware to run it, plus all of the other things you’re going to have open as a teacher.

RYAN: I think a lot of manufacturers as well have tended to, over the last few years, move towards some kind of online version of resources as well, where teachers were then being left with a desktop app and an online resource. It is like, I don’t know which one to use. Where do I find X, Y, and Z? LYNX is really simple. Just click on your desktop app. It’s there. It works.

PRITESH: If anybody is interested in what we’ve just spoken about, and I’m sure there will be, they can contact us. We’ll arrange a demo. If you need a loan board or are thinking about upgrading to something a bit more modern, we can arrange and facilitate that. You just have to get in touch with us. There’s no obligation, and we’ll give you the support. You can see what else is out there and what options are available. I think it’s an eye-opener, especially if you’re moving from something even five or six years old, which doesn’t seem that far away, to now there’s been such a jump in everything with the operating system and the chipsets. On the entry-level boards, other manufacturers struggle with running multiple applications with lots of windows open and processing going on without the board straining.

SAMANTHA: Our products meet everyone’s budget and performance levels. I think Ryan’s probably more able to go down deeper on the technicalities, but certainly, yes.
We have prided ourselves on being a premium brand because we want to ensure we produce quality products. That even applies to the new screen that we bring out as our baseline model.

RYAN: Yes, we have our baseline model, our X5, which is Google EDLA certified. If you’re a Google school, you can have your Google content on there, Google Drive and Google Classroom integrated. If you’re a Microsoft school, you can still access all the Microsoft content through the Play Store. So you get security patches through the Play Store as well. So you’ve got that kind of backup. Then we have our mid-range screen, the IMPACT Max. Max 2 is the current model, and we’ve just released a new version of it. It allows you to have up to 8 app windows open at the same time. You’ve got that full functionality, and it’s brilliant for teachers. You can have all your different content – your Google slides here and a PowerPoint over there. It’s great for things like guided reading. You can have your text, questions, and all that stuff on the same screen or the LYNX whiteboard, which you can have as one of your app windows. And then we have our IMPACT Lux, which is, again, Google certified. That was the first screen in the world to undergo the Google certification process. We, as a company, are proud to have achieved that. It shows how we’re innovating ahead of the other manufacturers. That screen is just fantastic. I’m going to get a bit nerdy now. It’s got the Rockchip RK3588, which is the fastest chipset you can have on a screen.

SAMANTHA: It’s exclusive to us. You really can see the performance level of it. You can have very hungry apps like Google Earth running next to YouTube and then picture-in-picture with your laptop, and everything works seamlessly.

RYAN: Yes, it’s fantastic. Having 8 app windows open at the same time slows everything down on many boards, but on the Lux, it’s really fast.

PRITESH: We are being a bit nerdy. What kind of resolutions and screen sizes do you offer?

RYAN: All the screens are 4k and come in 65, 75 and 86” versions. We did have a 55 a few years ago. That was quite niche for smaller classrooms, and because of the price coming down, it’s a little bit like TVs at home. Everybody’s getting bigger TVs, and the price is coming down. What we’re finding now is the 65, which was the most popular a couple of years ago, is not as popular. The 75” has become the go-to screen of choice. The 86” is perfect for school halls, lecture theatres and where you’ve got bigger space. The sound capabilities on the screens are fantastic. On the IMPACT Lux, you’ve got 60 Watts of sound, two speakers and a subwoofer built in.

PRITESH: We used to recommend soundbars. But now, as you said, the sound is great with the new boards, covering the whole classroom. The subwoofer also helps. It makes the sound quite realistic, not so tinny, and can be projected to the back of the classroom. I know you guys travel quite a lot to exhibitions and conferences. If any of the schools want to see you and speak face to face, I know they can come to the offices, but if they see you out on the road, where can they see you? Where do you get to these days?

SAMANTHA: We exhibit at many trade shows all over the world. The Bett Show has always been the big one in the education calendar. But we’ve got this fantastic space here in Barbican near Farringdon. It’s only a short journey from the Excel Centre where the Bett Show is held. We encourage people to come to our showrooms. We’ve got one in Leeds, another in Livingston, and one in Kent. We’ve got them everywhere in Europe too. But, even with the Bett Show, we’re using this year to bring people in to see us. Reach out to us. We can always let you know where we are.

RYAN: You can get in touch via our website, and if you are a trust or school, we can invite you in to look. This space is really useful in terms of our whole ecosystem, with things like our free-standing sites, totems, and room booking panels. It’s often quite difficult to get a space, particularly when you’re at Bett; there’s quite a lot of traffic and noise. It’s also sometimes difficult to have those private conversations and to show people the full effect of the whole ecosystem in one go. If we can contact you, we can arrange an on-site demo at the school.

SAMANTHA: We can be reached in various ways, but we always encourage people to try and utilise our showroom because often, they’ll come in looking at a touch screen for their classrooms, but then they’ll realise there’s value in what we’re doing for the communication aspect. People are starting to go down that sort of digital route.

PRITESH: In terms of the future, what are we looking at? If you’d told schools 10 years ago that everyone would have these amazing boards that integrate with Google, even with the conferencing and webcams, it would be unbelievable. 10 years ago, many schools still had projectors and smart boards out, right? What’s in the future? What’s in the pipeline? Are you allowed to say? Is it classified?

RYAN: I think AI will be massive in education and with the wider society. We have a Pro version of our LYNX Whiteboard software with AI features. It has a lesson generator so you can create presentations. You just put in the topic to create a presentation. You choose what type of slides and images to use, and you can generate quizzes and all sorts of different things.
We have activities which are AI-based as well. So again, it can create content for you with activities and things like handwriting recognition, pens, and maths tools, where it calculates answers for you. So that kind of thing is already there. It’s already in existence. I think we will see AI improve because, at the moment, when you use AI features for education, it doesn’t matter which platform you use. As a teacher, you look at something and edit it because it’s not quite what you want it to be. If, for example, you did use a lesson generator, it might create something more akin to a medium-term lesson plan, as opposed to a daily lesson plan, which you then use. So you can take that, and then you can adapt it, and you can use it. But I think in the future, we’ll see that the more input it has, the better it will get at hitting the target the first time. So, I think we’ll see improvements in AI features and maybe other useful uses for AI features.

PRITESH: I know that whenever we’ve come to you with a suggestion because we’ve had training workshops here, you’ve showcased all your products and always asked us.
What do you hear out and about in the schools? People have said they want a certain feature introduced. I know you welcome new ideas and suggestions and always try to integrate them. You’ve got a great development team. So, this is from me now because I love VR and virtual reality. Is there any capacity to integrate VR or virtual reality with these boards?

RYAN: That’s absolutely possible now. And I think that’s very similar to when talking to anyone about drones. You can use drones with screens because you can easily install the applicable apps.
The first thing you can do is install a drone or VR headset app. Then, everything you see will be displayed on the large screen.
I know there’s a real expense associated with them, particularly if you’re looking at a class set of VR headsets. That’s very prohibitive for many schools. If you had 5 sets of headsets, you could put those on and then share those to the screen as well. You’ve got Clevershare as well. If you’re running your VR app off your phone, you can Clevershare that to the screen. You can have up to nine different VR headsets displayed simultaneously.

SAMANTHA: Then, within Clevershare, you’ve got a broadcast feature so I can broadcast to other devices so that everyone could be looking at those as well.

RYAN: So even things like augmented reality, you can use an iPad. I’ve used one where you point your camera at a page in a book, and suddenly, the dinosaur comes to life. You can see the dinosaur walking across the screen. If you’re casting that to your Clevertouch, you’ve got a large dinosaur walking across the screen.

SAMANTHA: Plus, you’ve got all the annotation tools and the overlay you can use for the collaboration piece.

PRITESH: That’s really exciting. This can all be demoed, right? So, if anyone listening at the moment is as excited about all this stuff as I am, we can arrange demos and think about the impact it has on pupils and engagement. This is on an educational level. We all know youngsters these days – I’ve got some on my own – love their gaming, gadgets, and technology. So, to steer them in the right direction and show them that it’s not just about gaming, browsing and buying stuff on Amazon. It’s also about using that for creativity. As you said, with the dinosaur, the drones, geography, and augmented reality, it’s all possible.

SAMANTHA: The benefit to kids is that they can relate to it. They understand it. And it’s just bringing that into their education. It’s just going to resonate with them so well. And, for us, sometimes it’s hard to adapt to the technology, but I’m trying to say that this is why your adoption piece is so important.
So we help people not fear technology and the changes but see how they can use technology to benefit the kids.

PRITESH: And just going back to while we’re talking about it. If schools are interested in VR headsets, we spoke about the purchasing costs, which can be high and prohibitive. We can facilitate the loaning of VR headsets. So, if there’s anyone interested out there who wants to see how a Clevertouch board can be used with VR headsets and then integrated into lesson plans, etc, we can help. Classroom 365 can help you arrange loan equipment on an ongoing or short-term basis. I think today has been brilliant. I’ve learned a lot. I know Ryan’s enthusiastic about Clevertouch. You can see that I’m enthusiastic about Clevertouch. Because of what we’ve spoken about today, it’s not just words and a sales pitch. I have seen it; it’s so good. When you see that, from talking here to seeing it in action in schools, it’s like the trust we spoke about. They are all using LYNX now, and all the boards talk to each other. Our team is supporting Clevertouch boards using the MDM. When you talk about it, it seems great, but when you see it in action, rolled out, and it’s working, it’s powerful. LYNX makes the teachers’ lives easier, and this makes our lives easier. It’s great what you guys at Boxlight are doing to develop all these boards, and thank you for taking our suggestions on board as well.

SAMANTHA: We always like to hear from you, and we all like to get feedback on how we can improve and create a product that’s good for the users, so we do take that on board. We’ve got a great relationship with Classroom365. You guys are a fantastic company; get the tech and understand the process. We look forward to helping to roll this out to more schools.

PRITESH: Amazing. Thank you, Samantha. Thank you, Ryan. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, everyone, for listening to our podcast on Clevertouch and technology in the classroom. Catch us next time.