With Covid-19 most of the schools in US States cannot go back in September with fiull classes so will have to teach physical classes with remote students. While the ideal solution is Webex Board Plus Room Kit / Room in companion mode, many schools already have an interactive whiteboard. Promethian Board has 83% of that market.
In order to be able to get access to the education and get a foothold our strategy should be to complement initially and then replace on a hardware refresh when the school is looking to replace their Interactive Boards. If you have a Promethian or Smart Board the teacher can connect their Laptop and with USB Pasthrough can use the Promethian to launch a Webex / Teams call. Proximity will auto detect the paired Room Kit on display at the back or side of the classroom and now the remote children will be shown on there. All of this works today. However when the teacher pushes content on the Promethian Board for local students, he/she will lose the far end students as content will be prominent on the Room Kit. So the request is to have a default mode setting for education where in this case the Room Kit will still show the students at home full screen and have content in a PIP as an indication only to show the teacher that content has been pushed to the far end.
For the teacher the value is that they see the whole class local and remote in front of them (this would not be the case with a single video system). For the remote students they are now "in" the classroom and not "in front of the class". This is significant as having students in front of the class causes issues that the teacher will often have the back of the heads showing and cannot make local and remote feel as one.
