IWB -v- Apple TV - which is best for 21st century learners?

This afternoon I was in a Kindergarten class and was talking to the teacher there about how she is using  her Apple TV.   We don't have IWBs here, and Tiffany herself told me that she'd never used one so it was hard for her to compare the two, but she gave me lots of ideas for how she is using the Apple TV with her students.  Her Apple TV is connected to a TV that can be moved around in her learning space.  She has a lot of windows in this space and no walls at all so an IWB would not be practical.  She talked about different posters that she has created on her computer that she can pull up for the students to refer to and said she finds this better than a visualizer as she can work with Word documents on her computer that the students can all see.  She also uses it with YouTube and other videos and this morning was using it to connect to the Illuminations website to demonstrate a maths concept.

Tiffany chose to have a MacBook as her BYOD.  She also has an iPad and iPhone that she uses in class.  She was explaining to me that today they had a visitor to the classroom (a dog) and that she was able to connect the iPhone and iPad so that she could take photos and turn them into a slideshow that the students could immediately watch and interact with.  She talked to me about how engaged and excited her students were about this learning.

A couple of years ago at my old school I recommended using Apple TVs with iPads as a better solution than installing SMARTboards in all of our primary classrooms.  Of course this suggestion ran into problems with the one-size-fits-all policy there whereby all classrooms were being outfitted with the same IWBs, and I remember feeling extremely disappointed by the decision to purchase yet another teaching tool instead of spending the money on a set of iPads and putting the technology into the hands of the students.  I've used a SMARTboard since 2000 - when I worked at the International School of Amsterdam we were one of the first schools in the Netherlands to buy them, and I have to say as a teaching tool they were great.  As a learning tool for students though, not so.  Over the years I've dropped into literally hundreds of classrooms where they were not being used optimally, and where they simply reinforced the "sage on the stage" style of teaching.

Over the past couple of years or so I've also seen a different way of doing things, using Airplay, and iPads and an Apple TV.  Last year at ASB Unplugged I saw the participants at one of the presentations interacting with and sharing what they were doing on their iPads with the entire audience.  Anyone could wirelessly project to the entire room from anywhere.

Today I came across the Tech Savvy Teachers blog where the Apple TV-iPad combination was suggested as a better interactive whiteboard.   The post includes the following chart comparing IWBs with Apple TVs +iPads:

I think that one of the comments following this post really sums up the difference:

The nature of the iPad encourages the type of teaching most experts have agreed better meets the needs of 21st Century students.  Does a tool change teaching? Absolutely not, teachers do. But which tool will better facilitate learning? That’s the question we should be asking and the comparison between these two tools is obvious.