The TI-SmartView™ emulator is an easy to use demonstration tool for leading classroom teaching of graphic calculator-based work. Based on the TI-84 Plus family of graphing calculators (compatible with the TI-83 Plus family), the TI-SmartView emulator complements classroom calculator use by displaying on a projected screen an interactive representation of the calculator. The teacher can operate its buttons either by clicking with a mouse on the PC or, preferably, if you have an interactive whiteboard, by touching the buttons on the screen itself.

The teacher can simultaneously display on screen up to three representations of graph, table, equation, list window and STAT plot screens – increasing student understanding of concepts and relationships. In addition to that an actual TI-84 can be connected to the display and used to operate it. This will allow applications like the CBL to be run via the interative whiteboard. Screen displays can be captured and copied to other software such as Word. All key presses are clearly displayed too so students can follow everything one step at a time. The key presses can be saved as "scripts" to be played back later. In this way a teacher can prepare a demonstration without fear of an unexpected cock-up when faced with a class of amused, impatient and highly critical students.

The cost is round about £70 but this will need checking as prices are difficult to track down on the TI website.

I found the software was indeed easy to use as TI claim it is and intuitive throughout. In some ways it creates a system for classroom display that rivals other interactive whiteboard software packages- particularly in areas like arithmetic, sequences and graphs, though it is a little slow with some of the apps. Overall though I have no hesitation in concluding it is useful and so highly recommended.

You might like to stop reading now because I wanted to go one step further on to see if I could get a calculator to communicate with it - as advertised. This proved to be a saga taking the best part of an evening.

I have a TI-84 Plus Silver edition with operating system 2.22. TI-Smartview requires OS 2.4. So this will need downloading from the TI website (easy to do) and uploading to the calculator (very difficult). All this needs TI-Connect (freely available from TI) which facilitates communication between calculator and computer. At first I could not get the computer to recognise the calculator, then it did and I started to load OS 2.4, only for it to stop halfway through and leave my calculator with no OS at all and therefore useless! After going round many options again and again, including consideration of whether I had now to send my calculator back to TI headquarters, switching things off and on, removing batteries, looking for a pinhole reset button, I managed finally to load the original OS. Back at square one I decided, bravely, to load version 2.4 again, this time with success. At this point I discovered my calculator did not have the SmartPad application which is necessary for the calculator to take over control of TI-Smartview. I downloaded it easily enough but then could not see how TI-Connect was supposed to upload it to the calculator. After a search though numerous help files I discovered that I had to drag and drop the app file onto the TI-Connect icon on the desk top. This worked! I suspect now that the TI people behind all this are using Apple Macs. If so, I think they need to consider how unfriendly all the above would be for us hoards of PC users.

So I got it all working and now my calculator controls the computer screen. Magic. Now I contemplate getting all this set up at school...