Teaching, Creating and Collaborating with Smart-Lightboard™

In this video, we are going to talk about something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago and also where we are taking this channel going forward. My name is Jimmy Engström, and I work as a lead developer for a company here in Sweden. By night, I am a content creator. I'm a Microsoft MVP, and last year, I became educator of the year, which is something that I'm really proud of. And together with my wife, we are running a small tech company mostly focused on creating content and educational material. When it comes to video content, I've been doing live streaming, YouTube videos, and also recorded courses online. So teaching by video is something that is very central to all the things that I do. My name is Jessica Engström. I'm an educator in the tech industry. I'm also awarded Microsoft MVP in the DevTech category. Me and my husband, Jimmy, we have been live streaming for a couple of years now. We also run a YouTube channel where we do mostly developer content and UX and accessibility content as well. I'm also an educator, so I have been more and more since the pandemic going towards online classes or even hybrid classes. The challenge before we got the Smart Lightboard is that either you would be like talking head down small in the corner of the image or you would use a whiteboard and then you would often turn your back to the audience to scribble something. When I saw the lightboard for the first time and this was the analog one, it really blew my mind. Then I saw the smart lightboard, and it changed everything. You get the power of a whiteboard, but more immersive. You can be up front and center with the content, which makes it so much more immersive. And you can circle things, you can point to things, and the audience will immediately know what you are you're referring to. You are inside of the content. You can explain complex things, and you can keep the eye contact with the audience at any time. Another area which I found very helpful is when you are collaborating, redoing a website or building a website for that matter, you can sit down with the whole team and I can show them a sketch and we can instantly draw and sketch out what we need to do going forward. That shared visual context is super powerful. The really nice thing is that we can use our own applications. We can use Miro. We can use Paint, and we can use whatever application that we're used to. This also works with Teams calls, Zoom calls, or whatever it may be. So it doesn't have to be presentation. It can be in your everyday life. What we noticed is that the time from idea to we're starting to record and showing something is so much shorter now. And that's why we got the Smart Lightboard, because it's so easy to create really good content without an enormous effort. Now I'm a software developer, so I immediately saw that I can develop for this. So I started building my own software where inking is actually turned into text, a font that is easy to read because I usually say that I write encrypted because I can't read it and you definitely can't read it. As an educator, I have run a lot of hybrid and online accelerated learning programs and classes. When you're teaching, it's keeping the audience engaged and explaining complex things in an easier to understand way is super important. And the Smart Lightboard actually helps with that because I can emphasize exactly what's important and that actually transfers to the audience even if it's an online class. So would I recommend this smart lightboard for everyone else? Absolutely. I mean, it's so simple to create content. It is so easy to just switch over and show something on the lightboard. If you have a setup where you are talking to the audience in one setup and just move over to the lightboard, so the only thing you need, projector, the smart lightboard, and the camera, and you're all set. We're not only business partners, we're also co creators and conference speakers. Podcasters. Yeah. And of course, we are married. We are married. And now most people, they have a kitchen table. We don't. We have a smart light board. We do.