Chalkboards With Brains

theodp writes "Third graders at Columbia University's elementary school may never know the sound of fingernails scratching on a chalkboard. All across the country, dust-covered chalkboards are being ditched in favor of interactive whiteboards that allow students and teachers to share assignments, surf the web and edit video using their fingers as pens." From the article: "Bang uses the board to display a wide range of learning materials on her computer, from web pages to video clips. It is also used as a lunch-time reward for students: The children watched Black Beauty on the same screen that was used earlier for geography."

Price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

These things must cost $10k or so. Nice use of school funds. Meanwhile the students are using 10 year old computers and walking under leaky roofs.

Re:Real value

[aslate]

These interactive whiteboards are not just "gee whiz" toys, but once you get used to them, are truly powerful.

Our school got a grant of £30,000 to be spent on interactive whiteboards, at £3,000 each. Only 3 teachers ever use them, one uses it simply as a projector, one switches back to using it as a normal whiteboard frequently as it's easier and the other has lots of problems. He erases something, it pops back up when he starts writing again, undo then undoes the last minute of text and then he has to start again. He has used it for some useful purposes (Graphs from Autograph), but has a lot of problems.

Add to this the fact that it's one of the top schools it the country (About 5th in league tables), i can see a lot of wasted money on these things.

Re:Potential for abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

No Joke, My wife uses these at the local college. They are connected to the internet directly and guess what. They are constantly invaded by spyware and porn popups. I hope the kiddie versions of these are more robust.

Re:What OS is this thing running?

[ZakuSage]

Upon further inspection, it's definitely running Mac OS X. http://a1112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091469/ww w.wired.com/news/images/manual/smartboard2_f.jpg [akamai.net] This clearly shows a blue apple in the upper left hand corner, and the bottem panel is that of Mac OS X's. Problem solved, I guess. :)

If only they were used right...

[aj50]

We have boards like these at college and they work very well. They do pretty much what they say they do, you can write something, start again with a completely blank board, recall whatever you wrote to start with, call up a picture, graph or other data and annotate it but we are hit with the disasterous probelm that the teachers, despite using them on a reegular basis still find them difficult to use and I often end up board as my teacher tries to remember where he saved the video clip used to illustrate standing waves.

These boards also all have some eccentricities such thinking you've drawn a line when you havn't and it is infuiating the amount of time that this wastes. I often end up wishing they would just use the bloody things as ordinary whiteboards most of the time.

Educational Value

[sirgallihad]

At my school, the whole place is getting smart boards as part of a 3 year plan. What my school is doing that is diffrent is that before giving teachers a 3000$ touchscreen and saying "Use it, because it will make us really good on paper" , teacher are reciving lessons on how to operate the boards, and how to integrate technology with teaching. This also applies to our new laptop program, which is following a similar plan for application. This goes to show that not all educators, as you claim, are just giving educators this high-tech equipment and telling them to use it, but are rather are teaching them how to use it first. This makes the money spent on technology worthwile and beneficial to the student. As an example, one of our teacher is using the board in math class. She uses the board to give notes, then later saves them and makes them avalable for all to download after the class is done. This provides an invaluable study tool for students. Also, you can buy more software for these boards that facilitate teaching in various classes, such as a math package complete with functional proractor, ruler, cartesian planes, and various shapes. These are all at the disposal of the teacher to use as they see fit. It can really clarify such lessons as making transformations on a cartesian plane, or showing why the three inside angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees. So, to summarize, yes smart boards can be useful, it only depends on the education of the teacher

Re:Purpose?

[advocate_one]

"So why should cash-strapped schools spend thousands (millions?) of dollars on yet another piece of only semi-useful technology instead of attracting more and better teachers, repairing or replacing crumbling buildings, or funding music and art education programs?"

different funding sources with specific rules as to what each can be spent on... ie. you can't take funds for IT and use them to pay better wages to attract better teachers or to improve the building fabric... the money for those whiteboards may have come in the form of a grant with very specific terms

We had 30 of these!

[sigemund]

When I graduated college, I went back to work as a sysadmin at my old high school. When I got there, they had just completed their first year with four smartboards as a trial. The year I arrived, we opened up a new building with 13 new SmartBoard Systems. There are several different companies that do this stuff, but the SmartBoard is kind of the leader in the industry -- http://www.smarttech.com/ [smarttech.com]

The total setup runs around $15 grand, plus or minus depending on what you do with it. The projector is the most expensive part, at around $5-6000 for a really nice one. The board itself runs around $2000, for the basic model. To make it easier to start up, we had a touchpanel on the wall with various functions on it - turn on projector, show computer, show video, show laptop, blank screen, increase volume, etc. That really helped make the whole setup a lot easier to use for people.

Since we had them for so long, we had a pretty good understanding of what works and what doesn't.
The neatest thing about the SmartBoard is that you can kind of make it what you want. If you want it to just be a whiteboard, it can do that. If you want it to be a glorified powerpoint viewer, you can do that. If you want to really get into it, you can start to do all sorts of cool interactive applications with it. Smart Technology's software has improved markedly in the past few years, and the new version allows you to embed all sorts of multimedia objects, and best of all -- Flash! There is a TON of potential with the new capabilities.

Because it is so versatile, it integrates very easily and very smoothly into existing classrooms. Teachers typically find it very easy to use, provided you have done a good job with setup. Maintenance can get to be time consuming -- teachers rely on these things every single minute of the day, and they have to be working all the time. But there are like two-dozen points of failure. Then there's the projector -- the bulbs cost about $500 each, and last about 1400 hours. Maintaining the SmartBoard setups consumed probably about 20% of my time overall when I worked there.

Through my four years there (I just quit in May to go to grad school at CMU), we eventually ramped up to just over 30 of them. Every teacher wants one, and most teachers used them pretty well. Is it $15,000 well? Probably not, but the students really like them, and a dedicated teacher can REALLY do a lot with them.

I taught for two years, in both a SmartBoard classroom and a non SmartBoard classroom. I taught programming, and having the ability to show the programs on the board and edit code on the board was just fantastic. At one point, I did get moved to a classroom without a SmartBoard and with just a regular old chalkboard. Personally, I preferred using the chalkboard, but really just because: a) if you want to use the smartboard well, you should be prepared for class -- I was never prepared, b) I write a bit too fast and too sloppy for the SmartBoard to pick it up well, c) I like having a LOT of space on which to write, d) playing with chalk is fun. If I had more time to put into the class I was teaching, I would've really gotten a lot more out of the SmartBoard capability when I had it.

A lot of schools are faced with increasing pressure to bring computers and "technology" into the classroom. The primary thrust has been laptop programs. Personally, I think the laptop has very little place in a HS classroom. Our neighboring school did the laptop program, and they had some up and more down with it. The laptop creates a barrier inbetween the teacher and the student. In theory, it creates a more self-driven learning approach. But in High School, 99% of students are not self-driving their learning, they are playing games or on AIM most of the time. And the support costs for a laptop program are astronomical. In contrast, the SmartBoard is a teacher-driven approach that restores the focus back to the front of the classroom and the ma

Re:Real value

[danheretic]

One was very excited about all of the presentational gadgetry at her community college. Luckily she had some very good professors, but sometimes the gadgetry failed at inopportune times.

I realize you're speaking more generally here, but as to the interactive whiteboards (at least the kind we use in the College where I'm an IT guy), if they do suffer "gadgetry failure", they're also fully functional as regular whiteboards. In fact, some lectureres use them only as such. It's just nice to have the choice.