What Are Collaboration Displays?

Collaboration displays are common in business settings already, but they are quickly moving into the education space as well. Despite being in very different settings, their functions remain mostly the same. They allow people to work together in one visual space, even despite great distances. Though they do have some uses specific to teaching that may surprise you.

Read more below on collaboration displays and how they could benefit you. 

Did you know that decades back, computers were the size of whole offices and long-distance calls could only be made on specific days and times?

There are many differences when comparing workplaces and educational institutions today to the way they were back then. Whiteboards have been replaced by collaboration displays, letters sent by mail have been replaced by emails, and the list goes on…

The future really is here. This holds true in all walks of life, especially in regards to displays and collaboration. With today’s level of technological advancement, those 2 concepts have fused to create collaboration displays. 

Throughout all of these changes though, collaboration among coworkers and classmates is as important today as it was back then. Chances are high that you’re in an environment right now that calls for some amount of teamwork once in a while. This is where collaboration displays come in. 

• In decades past, this requirement largely meant that employees and classmates had to constantly be in the same environment in order to work in tandem. 
• In those days, a whiteboard was almost always the focal point of any interaction as they were the best means for sharing ideas during the brainstorming and planning phases. 
• Today, collaboration displays are being used as a more effective means of facilitating collaboration in business and educational settings, spanning everything from group brainstorming to video conferencing.

For those interested in learning more about collaboration displays, be sure to read on. This is true for those interested in collaboration displays’ business and education-specific applications, as well as for those requiring tips regarding the displays’ overall implementation.

What Are Collaboration Displays?

Put simply, collaborative displays take the concept of a whiteboard (which most of us have become accustomed to using from our school days) and turn it digital. The reason digital whiteboards are so effective is due to their ability to combine an array of digital and analog collaboration tools and merge them into a single platform.

The result is a piece of equipment similar to a personal tablet but much, much larger. Such integration has revolutionized the concept of collaboration entirely by going above and beyond the capabilities of a traditional whiteboard. Below are some common examples of how collaboration displays are being used to facilitate project collaboration in both business and in education.

How Are Collaboration Displays Used in Business?

In just about any business setting, a successful operation requires collaboration, plain and simple. The benefits of video conferencing, brainstorming sessions, or formal presentations in business are already pretty apparent. Delving deeper, collaboration displays are used to assist in this by way of their external device connectivity, visibility, sizing options, and software compatibility.

Group Collaboration During Meetings

An important aspect of collaboration displays is their PC interfaces simply because many of the benefits of these displays come as a result of connecting to them. For example, these PC interfaces allow you to easily sync your external computers, phones, or tablets, in order to properly mirror or upload necessary data in a business setting.

Manufacturers of collaboration displays also recognize that their products would be pretty useless without the native software and tools a business requires on a daily basis. These can include cloud storage, video conferencing, annotation, screen sharing, word processing, or any other professional-level application that you would have to use for business.

Collaboration display models typically offer sizes for all types of rooms, from personal offices to meeting rooms and beyond, without sacrificing their high-resolution visual quality. This is helpful when deciding on a collaborative display that can be integrated into any new workplace design trends your company is focusing on, whether it be for a huddle room or for a board room.

Facilitating Remote Collaborations

Another way collaboration displays are used is to facilitate remote collaboration, which refers to the project collaborations between teams located in different parts of the world. Nowadays, it’s common for international corporations to have factions of different teams located in different parts of the world. Remote collaboration acts as a solution to limitations imposed by distance.

Collaboration displays can be used as a means of facilitating collaborations from a centralized location, such as a company’s headquarters. Remote members can then join collaborative efforts with the help of collaborative tools and software. This type of remote collaboration serves a similar purpose to video conferencing, but with the added functionality provided by both the collaboration display and software used.

How Are Collaboration Displays Used in Education?

Collaboration displays are not just meant for business purposes; they are used in the education industry as well. Forward-thinking educational institutions have begun to experiment with digital classroom practices and classroom design trends geared towards countering the shortcomings of traditional education methods.

Many of these practices, such as flipped classrooms, blended learning, and video in the classroom, revolve around incorporating technology into their educational ecosystem. Collaborative displays act as a means of effectively facilitating many of these modern practices by nature and act as a solution to the limitations associated with traditional whiteboards. Much like the benefits collaboration displays provide for business-centric use, this technology can also do wonders in facilitating lessons, instructive games, general technological integration, and standard group-based work.

Implementation During Lessons

In regard to everyday lessons, there’s no shortage of benefits that collaboration displays bring. If engaging in a class-wide reading, text display and interactive collaboration can be conducted more effectively than with traditional overhead and interactive projectors.

Moreover, if a student makes a mistake, collaboration displays make it easy to annotate on the spot, thus providing to immediately demonstrate a teachable lesson. As an example, it is said that foreign language vocabulary words are absorbed by students’ brains once they’ve interacted with the content 7 times, or thereabouts.

In a language learning environment, several of those 7 interactions, outside of learning done at home, can be facilitated by collaboration displays. Furthermore, the technology therein could be used to download and initiate relevant games, songs, and dialogues.

Preparation Before Class

Collaboration displays are helpful to educators during their pre-planning phase as well. Their integration with cloud storage and other online resources makes them great for lesson planning. Some of the benefits collaborative displays offer during the pre-planning phase include mapping out upcoming lessons, annotating on past lessons for future use, sharing ideas with colleagues, or even getting materials ready for an incoming class.

Implementing a Collaboration Display

We’ve established that collaborative displays are being used by businesses to enhance collaboration and that schools are boosting engagement with interactive whiteboard technology.

So what can you expect from a collaborative display?

We’ll take a look at the collaboration display that won the ‘Best in Show award at InfoComm and ISTE in 2017, the ViewSonic ViewBoard IFP7550, to get an idea. Some collaborative displays, like this one, aim to provide an out-of-the-box collaborative experience.

Collaborative displays like this have geared their hardware toward group collaboration and functionality. Features such as 4K clarity, 20-point multiple touchpoints, 16GB of onboard storage, and interactive annotation software are how they achieve this collaborative functionality. As collaborative displays become more common, it’s clear that this type of solution is going to be beneficial for a wide range of different types of group settings.  

All collaboration displays on the market are not built equal, however. Some products go the route of having clients pay for the privilege of using their required applications or may have limited compatibility with an organization’s existing software infrastructure.

Other products may offer a built-in PC, thus allowing users to customize their own experiences. In the case of the collaboration display discussed above, ViewSonic has also developed an online whiteboarding platform for users to take advantage of.

The MyViewBoard platform aims to merge its collaborative display with virtual online interactivity. This platform expands on the collaborative capabilities of their displays by providing personalized whiteboarding that follows you wherever you go along with collaborative features including:

• Access to cloud storage
• Content sharing between devices or colleagues
• Remote meeting conduction
• Easy distribution of documents
• Multimedia integration such as YouTube and image files

At the end of the day, collaboration displays are powerful tools for collaboration that are here to stay. If you’re in the education or business industry and haven’t begun to leverage the benefits of using a collaboration display, upgrading to one is a quality of life upgrade worth considering. If you’re interested in learning more about collaborative displays you can check out ViewSonic’s ViewBoard Large Format Displays to see if there is an option that sounds right for you.