Slashdot Mirror
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."
I wonder just what the modern equivalent of "Teacher sux!" would be?
liqbase
These interactive whiteboards are not just "gee whiz" toys, but once you get used to them, are truly powerful.
For example, editing what you've written, brings a whole new aspect to writing on a board. Being able to "drag" a chunk of what you've written to make room for something you forgot or didn't have room for, is a life saver. Similarly, if you run low on room, you can scale everything you've written down a bit, and continue on without having to break up your work. Very powerful.
Similarly, being able to flip back and forth between "pages" of stuff that wouldn't fit on one board, or after you've moved on, and want to refer back, is very convenient.
Getting hard copies of everything on the board, another major value.
The previous generation with which I'm familiar, took a bit of practice to use, so some folks in our company didn't take to it; but I'm sure the technology (esp the software) has evolved, and kids pick things up more quickly than adults, anyway.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It would make detention fun , you could write your 100 lines on the blackboard with a simple script then surf the net till the teacher returns
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
... the sound of fingernails scratching on a chalkboard.
Ewwww!
Don't do that! You might as well have included hello.jpg in the story!
Now, think of your breathing.
nothing like an unauthorised public performance to get the MPAA on your ass... perhaps they should have checked the little license that is shown when playing the dvd... the one which defines what constitutes home use...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I desperately want a touchscreen device, but I am torn.
I hate people touching my screen, and hate to do it myself.
I can try to enforce using a stylus at all times, but having the screen touchy would make their fingers gravitate to it.
liqbase
Pfft my high school uses mimio boards and Palm handhelds, and an elementary school gets to be on Slashdot? =) Anyhoo, the mimio boards are really nice, it's a LOT easier to type notes from a nice powerpoint than from a teachers nasty hand writing. I don't see what the big deal is with this little elementary kids though, because my school's been "High tech" since Fall 2003 when it was constructed =P
This is a rather interesting concept. I'm at university now and the professors have a bunch of seperate equipment in the lecture halls. There's usually an overhead (with horrible refresh rates I might add) connected to the projector. You can also connect your laptop to the projector. Of course you need the screen to be down for this, which always covers the black or white boards. Some of the larger lecture halls have side black or white boards which makes it a bit easier to work out problems on the side while having notes and references on the screen. I'm sure these new interactive boards could make the classroom more efficient if it's used properly. Heck, if they start to put these in my university they can just upload the notes scribbled on the board to the class webpage. Even more incentive for me to stay home and drink =P.
No more getting caught putting pieces of chalk into the slits of the erasers. Bummer. The oldest trick in the book is now gone.
Of course on the brighter side you do open up the opprortunity to hack the whiteboard and insert funny images onto the screen on the most opportune time. And then there's accidently surfing to whitehouse.com by the teacher.
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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.
I think the more general problem is: 10 year old use computers, and everybody is really really desperate to get them to get them to use high-tech wizardry, when really what all that does is make kids multimediocre.
Primary school don't need computers to teach kid to read, write and do basic math. They need good well-paid students and good quality schoolbooks...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They look to be front projection screens. That seems like it would be really annoying to use, constantly avoiding your own shadow.
cygnuhchur
"The children watched Black Beauty on the same screen that was used earlier for geography."
And that is supposed to be reward ? Poor Kids.
They need good well-paid students and good quality schoolbooks...
well, paying the students WOULD be a great motivation to come to class everyday, but try getting that one through the schoolboard...
Monstar L
I really, really like the old-school really black black-boards. When I was visiting princeton I really liked how the entire physics department is full of old blackboards in every office and on all corridors together with *do no clean* notes to inform cleaners not to clean a really cool equation you discussed with your colleague on the corridor.
I know is kind of wanky, but nothing can replace the coolness of real blackboards. I really hate that mu department has just these new white boards and that my office mate prevents me from buying one old-school blackboard for our office since he has allergy to the chalk dust...
I hope that the school paid the public showing fees and license fees to disney and the mpaa for that viewing of "black beauty"
I for one sure hope they're showing kids the right Black Beauty, and not other kinds.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We never hear the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, anyway. Every school in the area has whiteboards (non-interactive ones, unfortunately) nowadays. The one interactive whiteboard I've seen in my school has never been used for anything.
http://unelite.freelinuxhost.com - Rock/Scissors/Paper and RPGs shouldn't mix.
They need good well-paid students
:-)
Oops I meant teachers of course
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Anyway, there was also discussions about electronic whiteboards in our office. But somebody said that writing it down on his notebook is all that keeps him awake. So when teaching a bunch of motivated, interested students , with a good teacher this might come in handy. But in general, this much technology is wasted on school children.
The most important duty of a teacher is to make sure the children learn, not to teach. This looks like it might help the teachers concentrate more on the latter.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
We've had interactive whiteboards for several years in our school (in England), and it's not desperately new technology, although a special pen/stylus has to be used where we come from. I think it's fully justifiable spending that kind of money on new whiteboards because there's a wealth of information out of the Internet, and you would spend an unimaginable amount of money buying textbooks containing just some of the information. Of course, whiteboards aren't a replacement for the teacher, but I'm betting some think it is.
From the pictures it seems that the class room needs to be quite dark for the board to be legible. I can't help but wonder how this will affect the poor kids' eyes...
These things are ancient. They are just normal projectors with a pressure-sensitive screen and a bit of software to get them working together with a PC. They come with pens without nibs and a piece of software so you can "draw" on them.
My UK-type school thing has had these for 6 years and they are good for teaching stuff like ICT, but they're never going to replace good ol' white boards since they're not as nice to write on. They are, however, great for putting obscene stuff on the screen while the teacher isn't looking.
We've known them as "Smartboards" in my school... They also keep getting stolen (3-4 in the last few yers), as a projector is quite an expensive item and kids are quite handy at robbing places.
SmartBoards can also run on Linux and Apple, its not the fault of the board manufactuer' it is the fault of the alternative OS's not being prevailent in schools.
You bought her a Kentucky Fried Chicken Franchise!!!
A system which does work and has *gasp* -- found a use for tablet PCs -- is where the teacher has the TabletPC and walks around the classroom with it. The TabletPC is wirelessly linked to the projector, so the teacher can work as if he/she was at the whiteboard but on the tablet PC. This is great for explaining to students and actually offers an advantage over traditional whiteboard setup, rather than just being a "wow look at the pretty transition effects" toy. HWLC have been using this for a while.
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Not only that, but whiteboards are worse on the eyes than chalkboards (As far as written text is concerned). I'm too lazy to google a support link, but I know the data for this is all over out there.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
From my own experience (student at secondary school in UK), the cost of these screens is not worth it (in my particular school),
They are underutilized; teachers don't know how to use them (one of my teachers spent half a lesson with an IT guy in the room trying to get it to work). These things have been placed in every classroom in my school, afaic they should be concentrating on paying teachers more and buying textbooks (some maths classes get photocopies every lesson - which ends up just as expensive in the end, just the money is coming from a different department!).
This "IT for schools" stuff is a load of **** imo, "going to the IT room" for many 12 year olds doesn't mean "yay, enhanced learning", it means "let's go on games sites whilst our teacher can't see what we are doing" (of course this is generally down to the teacher, but I am only speaking from my own experience). The real purpose seems to be keeping lazy IT support staff in the job (again I am only speaking for ONE SCHOOL)
The screens on a few occasions have been used by a few teachers to show websites etc, but I don't find it especially useful compared to them explaining properly how it works (perhaps this is just the way I learn).
There is no substitute for a proper teacher explaining something properly on a proper black board!
Hmm...
The four year old computers at my school BARELY have enough power for MS Publisher and one IE window for research... Specs are: Celery 1.1GHz Coppermine, 256MB PC133, 20GB DeskStar 60GXP (we've had two die already), WinXP Pro Corporate SP1 (illegal install, but a site license was then slapped on top of it), Office XP
The five year old computers can't really do that without thrashing swap (although, those are LOADED with spyware...) Specs: P3 866MHz, 128MB PC133, 20GB Seagate HDD, XP Pro, Office XP (software is same as the 4 year olds)
Then again, something's screwy, b/c I can run Publisher 2003 and Opera with a bunch of tabs open on my system, which is a 433MHz Celery, with 128MB of PC133 (running at 100, though, AFAICT), an 8.4GB Maxtor, and Win2K (I know, change the OS variable, everything changes...)
Of course, the students who got to use the gee whiz high tech equipement were most likely the students who would learn using any method for learning from reading a text to listening to a lecture to self discovery. This isn't necessarly a bad thing, but I'm sure that the salesman who makes the presentation that will kill off the marching band makes sure he points out test scores and attentiveness of the students as justification for the capital costs associated with the displays.
I'd really like to see these priced at a level that would encorage installation in the bottom 1/3 of the classrooms as well as the top. Then, maybe they'll have something.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I thnk a real pity about this is that it seems to require the room to be so dark. can anyone think of a solution for this?
As someone who suffers fom poor eyesight, I hate to see people abuse their vision like this.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
This is kinda old news. My school's been using these to teach geometry for a number of years. They're pretty neat. If you bump into them though it messes up the ability to write on it and it's a pain in the behind to recaliber.
Much cheaper than that. We have serveral and they cost around $2k. You do of course need a projector and computer, both these most schools have.
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?
Mod me a troll or whatever - maybe I'm just bitter and cynical because schools flipped out over computers and the promise that because kids were now doing math facts on Asteroids they'd be doing university-level numerical analysis before they got their drivers license. For what? Nothing. Schools invested millions and now are trapped in contracts with Microsoft for millions so kids don't have to pick up a pen and pull out a sheet of paper.
Kids don't learn better when you put something on a screen that someone sold the school with inflated promises in order to make their monthly sales commission. They (we!) learn better when we have good teachers with adequate supplies of basic essentials like books and teaching materials and we have an open mind.
America (the rest of the world too?) has got to stop this culture of worshipping the kids and bending to their will because something is "hard" or "boring". Kids whine about something and the country spends millions to accommodate them. Math is hard? Good, tough up kid because the rest of the world is tough and isn't going to bend to your will. Stop buying thousand dollar machines to add flashy videos of cartoon characters doing the bumb and grind to the multiplication table.
I whined about math being hard and used the crutch of calculators until I did A.P. Calculus AB/BC without a calculator. The best thing that ever happened to me. Then I realized the importance of getting to the details and nitty little things of a subject like math. When you can push yourself through difficult things, you build your ability to do tough things in the future. It sounds strange, but because I labored through calculus without a calculator, I'm a better computer science major. See? Character building!
Recalling the best classes/teachers I've ever had in my 15 years of public school and college now, the one's I've walked away with the most from have been the ones where we stuck to the basics: calculus without calculators, marching band without PDAs strapped to our heads, literature without ebooks, science without lame and detached "learning" computer programs, etc etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology. I'm a computer science major and I still have lofty ambitions of improving the world through computer science. But a computer is a tool to learn information. It shouldn't be the information.
A $2,000 blender does not a better chef make. A $2,000 computer does not a better educated kid make.
(This was a rant that spiraled out of control quickly. I blame the caffeine...)
We have about 10 of these in our district in Elementary and Secondary. The kids that are very intelligent are going to learn it whether on book, chalkboard, or interactive board. However, students with a learning disablity or just below level skills really have increased their scores and skills. They would tune out a teacher talking, but when she is splashing videos up, moving things around with just her hand, and having the students come up and work on it, they all are interested and learn.
Schools in the not so tech savvy public schools of South Australia have already had the experience of using a smart board for quite a while. :)
I mean, I hate MS as much as the next guy, but do you really need to use every opportunity to bash them, even if it's in a completely illogical way?
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
If I may interject a follow to your point; from the article: I think that about says it all. We now send out kids to school to "learn" how to use Google (as if they haven't already figgered that out on their own) with the implication being that search engines are the source of their education, so school isn't really necessary.
I'm still with Cliff Stoll on this. Tech in the classroom is, at best, a distraction. Learning is hard and often not much fun - it requires discipline and you just don't learn *that* when you are constantly distracted by flashy multimedia and powerpoint presentations.... and Google.
I have a secret hope that Google would realize this and start serving special pages that contain "Surgeon General warnings" about "the internet being harmful to your education" when requested from IP blocks allocated to schools.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
But if the teacher just put the movie in to give the kids a break on a hot summers day and allow him/her to grade some papers without being bothered...I am pretty sure that would fall outside of fair use in the USA.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
Lots and lots of schools over here in Britain have them Interactive Whiteboards, almost every room in my highschool has one, of course they run windows and hardly ever do as they're suppost due to some virus or another.
--
I work for an educational institution and we just happen to have several of those SMART technologies boards. I've seen them in action and maintained them and it seems like it just degenerates into another tool that teachers can use to lecture, except now they can use Powerpoint in class.
The students, on the other hand, rarely seem to get any value out of it unless the teacher doing the teaching is really goood, which brings us back to the core principle: Good teachers can convey knowledge with very few whiz bang doohickies.
Black beauty is a reward???
-DB-
E-mail is like a prison: a prison with no walls... and no toilet. -Strong Bad
Intrestingly in the UK they have started paying students. For 16-21 there is a thing called EMA which gives the students £30/week: provided they attend all their classes and behave themselves. It seems to be working as a motivational tool.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
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The Copyright exception is for excerpts -- for critique and review only. If you show an entire movie, you would still be in violation, IF you show a movie you brought from home. All of the movies in a school library (not in a public library though) have been purchased under a public performance license, so they can be shown to as many people as you want. That license comes at a VERY steep price though -- a DVD of a disney movie, for example, would be $75-100.
The 4 and 5 year old systems should be powerful enough to run Publisher + IE; one of the systems I used to admin was less powerful than that and was able to run Publisher, IE, Photoshop, and a bunch of other apps concurrently without any problems, though we were not using WinXP on that machine. That those systems are having trouble is probably more related to the software environment (the spyware, etc.) than the hardware one.
Ive seen and used these a fair bit. Often its best use is browsing website, theres some great material out there for education and the electronic whiteboard can really help. Great if you want to show a demo of some software, better than getting a class to huddle round a computer. Great for media related subjects, I've seen some very powerful videos on a whiteboard. For the most part a projector would do just fine. But on a couple of times I've made use of the interactive nature. The best fun has been a 3D program for displaying mathematical objects Singsurf. Here it really open up the idea of tactile computing. You can touch an object with you finger and drag it round, it almost feels like your holding the object. The students really responded well to this.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
. . .the students are using 10 year old computers and walking under leaky roofs.
Hey, all the comforts of home.
KFG
It doesn't matter what is used, just that there is no visible branding, etc.
...which makes a good teacher, it's the teacher's abilities. I've met very many bad teachers and lecturers in the past. The bad ones couldn't do good teaching no matter what technology you give them. The good ones would be good with or without those tools.
As others also said, kids [as we are talking about elementary schools here] can be very well taught without unnecesarry tech equipment. Why I say unnecessary ? Because if not used well [you know, tech for tech's sake] they can turn out to be more a distraction than a helping tool.
Also, making kids familiar with technology at an early age _can_ be good. But not when these are the _only_ tools they meet. I hope they can find the best balance somewhere in between.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I should imagine the cost of the bulbs for the whiteboard projectors will run in to the hundreds of dollars too.
With bulb lives as low as 1400hrs, thats possibly not the greatest of economies.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
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
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. :)
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.
I wish to remain anomalous
I think the more general problem is: 10 year old use computers, and everybody is really really desperate to get them to get them to use high-tech wizardry, when really what all that does is make kids multimediocre.
This really depends on how it is done. The computer can provide benefits if used properly. The problem is most people don't know how to effectively use a computer as a teaching tool. Almost all computer work I see kids doing is of the form "sit down and use this software package to learn stuff" or "search the intarweb for information on this subject." That's just lame and not really using a computer to its full potential.
There should also be more stuff for students who want to learn to programming. I know I wish I had something like that when I was in school. Back in the early 80's the elementary and middle school "computer" classes I had consisted of learning to type and looking up library books. This was quite lame considering I had already been programming computers for several years by the time I hit middle school. Near the end of high school I finally had the chance to take a programming class. LOL, what a joke. At that point I was already doing things like assembly language, C, and LISP. They were teaching BASIC. Well, trying to anyway because the teacher was learning while teaching the class and didn't know jack crap.
"Education" is a oxymoron.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
They work fine in normal light if you buy a half-way decent projector. Direct sunlight on the screen is a problem, but it is with a black- or white-board as well.
Hmm... I'm going to blame it on a combo of XP and spyware.
As a test, I got four of the P3 866 machines running 2000 (fully patched at the time), but otherwise an identical software configuration. They outright FLEW. And, they seemed somewhat immune to spyware, too - and that was without anybody changing their habits. (Granted, I used Opera, but I was in the minority - most people used IE)
Does a complete installation have any form of UPS for the board and management software? At least with regular whiteboards or chalk boards you could carry on working if the power failed or there was a glitch/spike.
AT&ROFLMAO
On a related note, in SIGGRAPH 2004, there was a paper that showcased software that can interpret simple gestures and allow an avatar to act accordingly. These gestures are simple doodles on the tablet such as a straight horizontal line (which will cause the avatar to walk forward), a vertical line (where the avatar will jump), a loop (causing the avatar to do a mid-air summersaut), as well as more complex combinations.
"All across the country", they say. Sounds like somebody's been snorting a little too much chalk dust.
Here in Portland, OR, they're trying to figure out how to replace the 3-year, 1.5% income tax that expires next year. When you're firing teachers and cutting classroom hours, you probably don't spend much time evalutating interactive keyboards.
They had these at my old school. Of the 8 or so teachers who taught me, there was only one who used the things to anything like their full potential.
Most teachers, like most normal people, are fairly clueless about computers. I am really not sure that foisting techie stuff upon them is the best approach to improving education.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
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
I've been working as a substitute teacher lately, and one of the challenges its getting kids to focus on *Anything* I think you're also overestimating the usefulness/reliability of non-google teaching material. http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/liesmyteachertoldme/li esmyteacher.html
http://tafkac.org/books/legends_lies.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
The children watched Black Beauty
:P
And you call that a reward?
Hmmm this gives me an idea.
"SILENCE!!! Or I'll show you the [censored] on the screen!"
(Kids shut up and gasp in horror)
(Professor calms down, clears his throat and beginst to talk) "As I was saying..."
It will increase the effectiveness of the teacher by, MAYBE, 2% and increase the cost of equipping the classrooms by... um... $5000 per classroom? A quarter of a million bucks?
For gear which will probably become obsolete in five years?
At a time when schools are having problems buying textbooks?
And teachers are being laid off?
Better they should fix the boilers. And rehire some teachers.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
What are you talking about? Columia swaps their public PCs every 2-3 years. They completd a swapout last summer. If students brought their hand-me-downs from home, that's not our problem. Judging from the number of iPods on campus, i don't think a 'suffer the children' routine for the majority of the campus is going to fly.
I do attest to their being one leaky roof that I'm aware of, but haven't seen any others.
Because of the novelty of it... as soon as that wears off, it's back to eating fingernails and boogers all day.
> surf the web and edit video using their fingers as pens."
tell me i'm not the only one who read this as fingers and penis?
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Yeah, I get that in September! :D
Not everyone does though; it depends on your parents' income.
...written on the blackboard. Teacher: "This is an unsolved problem. It is a good exerci... ... dammit"
What will the kids throw instead of chalkboard erasers? Batteries?
In this case change is bad.
Durability: All it takes is one pissed off kid stabbing it with a pencil to kill it. What about scratches? Assuming (hopefully) there is a clear screen protector most schools will wait until one can barely see through it before replacing. The screen protector would most likely cost a few hundred dollars and would need to be replaced once a year. Also repairing a big screen monitor like this is difficult and would require two people to pull it off the wall, deliver it to wherever it will be repaired and reinstall. Atleast three hours per person.
Obsolesce: Every few years these things get better and cheaper. $20k today is $10 in three years with a better picture and more features. In five to eight years these monitors will either sit in a pile like PII computers today or hang on the wall dead.
TCO: Between the initial cost, screen protectors and a short lifespan compared to a standard whiteboard these things IMO are way too pricey for the average secondary school.
Why not go with a LCD/DLP projector and a Mitsubishi DiamondTouch input device? A DiamondTouch "tablet" handles multiple, simultaneous input (two people can write on it at the same time), is incredibly durable and requires much less maintenance than a backlit screen. One could last for 10+ years handling input while the projector is updated every few years. IMO the TCO would be much lower than a huge touchscreen. As for durability it can be easily washed and very cheaply recovered. Since the sensors are on the sides and not behind the writing area it's rather immune from the "pencil penetration" scenario. Also Mitsubishi has been really good about driver support for GNU/Linux (along with MS Windows and Mac of course).
Will a backlit screen is nicer, a top lit projector and the above tablet IMO is a more realistic solution.
DiamondTouch Hardware
DiamondTouch Applications
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I teach algebra in Orange County, CA, and have been using one of these for most of the last school year. My school has probably 85% of the classrooms equipped with these, with the remaining 15% due to get them early next year. I use a Smart Board with a 12" PowerBook and an Epson LCD projector*. It is front projection, which can be a pain (especially when my clueless 7th and 8th graders look directly into the beam), but I do enjoy using it. With the Smart Board and a PowerPoint** presentation, I can cover more information in a class period than I can by just sitting at an overhead projector. This also allows me to have the full text of what I'm saying on the screen as I'm saying it, which allows both my auditory and visual learners to acquire more of the imformation. I craft the presentations in such a way that the example problems show every step of work on each click of my wireless presentation remote/laser pointer. If I need to highlight/underline/circle/do anything by hand, there is a selection of pens at the ready, just as if I was working at a chalkboard or whiteboard. However, I find being able to walk around the room while I explain how to factor trinomials does wonders for keeping my students on task.
Does the tech make me a better teacher? No, but it does allow me to keep the attention of my 180 hormonal 7th and 8th graders on a bright and sunny June day where you can smell the ocean on the breeze. Do all of the teachers who have Smart Boards at my school make use of them? No. Some simply do not want to while others do not know how to use them or integrate them into their lessons. Here is where the system starts to show flaws. The level of training we receive on technology is almost non-existant. My school and school district could stand to do much more there.
Smart Boards and computers are excellent tools to use in education, but are not a panecea for all of education's ills. Smaller class sizes would be an excellent first step. I have between 35 and 38 students per class, which is far too many to give any kind of individualized attention to in class. 25 to 30 per class would be really nice, and being able to achieve that mythical 20:1 student to teacher ratio would be heaven. Another thing that would be of big help to the level of education we can provide would be to have elemetary teachers who are not afraid of math. So many of my 7th graders barely know their multiplication tables, much less any trace of pre-algebra skills like how to work with formulas. Heaven forbid that I throw a fraction into a problem. We're trying to fix the problem of under-performing schools by making the Jr. High and High Schools so much more advanced, but we aren't getting the foundations laid securely enough to allow that to work. Better pay would be nice, but I'd much rather see math specialists at the elementary levels and more teachers in general first. Education is the foundation of every other career. If we do not support it properly, we're going to see more and more of the other professions suffer in the near future.
* - When using my LCD projector or overhead projector, I do not have to keep my room "oppressively dark." I have mini-blinds on my south-facing bank of windows and paper covering 80% of my north-facing windows, which is sufficient to be able to see either image source. In fact, my students almost uniformly prefer the dimmed room and natural lighting opposed to the harsh flourescents flooding the room. There is a chorus of groans whenever I turn the lights back on. Supposedly, we were going to get blackout curtains last year, and to be fair, we did get the runners installed, but here it is, 9 school days left, and no curtains yet. The paper stays on the windows.
** - I only use PowerPoint because it has Equation Editor and MathType. If Apple (or a third party) has something similar for use with KeyNote, I'd switch in a heartbeat. Maybe I should submit an "Ask Slashdot" for that one...
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Bzt, wrong, but thanks for playing.
Read 17 USC 110(1) to see that it's typically perfectly legal to show entire movies in the course of education.
Plus, your comment about movies in school libraries is insane. I think you don't understand the difference between public performance and distribution. You also haven't read 17 USC 109, which does not distinguish between public and educational libraries.
Frankly, I think you should probably stop talking about copyright matters, as you have no understanding of them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
As the other respondent said, that's only because it's a novelty. As soon as the novelty wears off they will tune out again. I wouldn't bother responding except he's at minus one and I'll be at plus one. Mod him up, cause that's what I would have done if I had mod points.
What the hell, theres something wrong with your system admins then. Pentium 3 coppermines and tualatins around 1 ghz kick ass - in fact, intel STILL MARKETS THEM AFTER FOUR YEARS! Yes, you can buy a BRAND NEW laptop with a 1.2ghz tualatin in it! Throw in a gig of ram and you won't notice how "old" it is technologically. Of course - I wouldn't be surprised if you had such troubles with a 1.5 ghz williamette.
Throw in half a gig of RAM or more and anything in the last decade can handle all web browsing (including flash and java crap), word processing, and use photoshop and etc. - if not more slowly for the latter stuff due to the processor. I have a pentium 3 1.2 ghz tualatin laptop with a gig of ram thats still going just as strong with modern apps (obviously not going to run Doom 3 on it) as it did when it came out 4 years ago. I also deal with a dual 600mhz katmai xeon (katmai with ECC cache) with 768MB of ECC RAM thats still going strong - stronger and more stable than any other piece of shit dell sends me these days.
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.
I'm not sure where the "reward" is in this... Except maybe in the apperciation of irony in that the geography lesson may have actually been more entertaining and had better cinematography?
About ten years ago there was a big push to bring the Internet to U.S. classrooms. I was pretty cynical about the results, figuring that most of the teachers were too afraid of computers to leverage this opportunity.
As it turns out, I was completely wrong. Not about the teachers, but they didn't really matter. I was wrong about the technology not being used. All those kids who didn't know that computers were hard to learn just sat down and taught themselves how to use these new toys, while the teachers just did their best to play catchup. I should have known better, since that's how I acquired my own skills.
So the big problem at your school would seem to be that the teachers "own" the new smart whiteboards. To them, education is just students sitting passively while the teachers lecture. If they went to a more participatory model -- which is a good idea, even without the technology -- the story would be rather different.
As it should. Or maybe it should just be billed to parents with high enough income to pay it. I see so many parents get high and mighty about giving their kids money. Give your kids money so they learn how to deal with the feelings you get from having money in your pocket. If you don't, then don't act surprised when they spend the rent money on new rims.
We have this system fully implemented where I work and have been using Smart Boards since '98.
The only hardware is the actual smart board. It connects to any computer running Windows through the serial port and uses IR to xmit/receive the info. There are other features like connecting it to student workstations so students in the back can view what's display without straining their eyes. The instructor controls that by switching user monitors to blank, local computer, or white board screen. The typical system usually used 2 display monitors. The smart board displays what is available on one monitor while the instructor can bring their guide up on the other monitor.
While trying to teach electronics, this is a great tool for showing signal flows and making notes on the scat. Oh, by the way, you can still use dry erase markers on these boards. Definitely worth their weight in gold and easy to use.
You can get more info http://www.smarttech.com/.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
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/
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
... As long as they can stand up to some vandalism..
Also, running Newton-style HWR and "doodle-correction" (turn fuzzy squares and circles into real ones) could be really nice, especially if you, say, write a URL in a box in a corner and the page pops up..
Preaching to the choir. I already said that I suspected that the XP installs were misconfigured (or that they didn't use 2000), and that there could be spyware.
FWIW, I'm switching from a Dell Inspiron 1100 (P4 2.2GHz Northwood, 384MB RAM, i845GL, Intel Extreme Graphics, 14.1" XGA, 30GB HDD, CD-ROM) to an IBM ThinkPad X21 (P3 700MHz Coppermine, 384MB RAM, i440ZXM, ATI Rage Mobility 4MB, 12.1" XGA, 20GB HDD, DVD-ROM in media slice). Yes, I know, CPU slowdown. However, it's a better system, and a LOT lighter (even with the media slice). 3.5lbs for the laptop, 5.8 with media slice, versus 8lbs for the Dell.
many libraries buy the more expensive more liberal-licensed versions which clearly allow for larger, group viewing.
the small clip clause is for educators who want kids to take video to put into projects. in those cases you cannot use more than a small amount of the total work (see link above)
in all, i am enjoying learning to integrate the smartboard, but i'm not convinced that it has contributed to a real improvement in learning over a simple projector and wireless mouse. the value resides in the lesson and the plan and the ppt and the gathering of demos and sites that support teaching. the smartboard makes executing these things a bit easier in class, but for a cash-strapped district, the board still strikes me as a bit of a novelty.
just my experience, after three months of actual use in a public school classroom. i'm going to be giving the kids a survey about it on wednesday, if you're interested, email me and i'll let you know what i find.
god is just pretend.
I don't think I ever heard the argument against chalboards. Alcohol pens are much more expensive than chalk, they can't be refilled, and they are made of plastic. That's not an improvement over chalkboards.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Third graders at Columbia University's elementary school
Columbia University has an elementary school?
I invented these in 1988, while drinking a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild with my dad.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
OK, here is what I what I see coming. A teacher will down load a government-approved assignment. With all the excitement an underpaid professional can muster, read the latest revised history.
Typically your standard "bad" student will take no notes (or junk notes). He might write the first two ideas in point form, and promptly fill the rest of the page with doodles of boobies (or rock band logos). What makes you think that he'll logon to the website to look at the teachers notes? Chances are, he won't even crack his backpack open when he gets home. If he does anything on a computer when he gets home, it's gaming.
Now University on the other hand....The profs are waaaay crappier than K12 teachers, and they just don't give a shit. They're smart people, I'll give you that. But they don't want to be there; they'd rather be doing their research stuff. It sucks to go to their classes. It's just them talking in the same old monotone voice, running through a bunch of crap that could be best learned on an individual basis.
That's where this stuff would do most good. You'd be able to avoid going to class, and still do fairly well. It would free-up your time to do important university stuff like masturbating, smoking reefer, eating like crap, and getting floor-licking drunk. But I digress.
Besides all that, this product is the same tired-old-shit. Nothing innovative here.
Interfaces for computing need to be revamped totally. Monitors suck. (Even LCD ones). Keyboards suck. Mice? Don't even get me started. All tired-old-shit. And I'm not talking about education. I'm talking about computing in general.
Ever see the movie Minority Report? Do ya remember the setup that Tom Cruise was using there? Now that's the shit I'm talking about. Visuals in mid-air. Moveable with your hands and shit.
Remember DS9? Cardassians had a pretty cool 2D interface. I know it was all just bullshit, but it certainly looked cool and looked like it could efficient at representing something (or anything).
Or let's just talk about something as simple as computing in bed. There's still nothing that works well here. Can't really lay on your belly with a laptop. The laptop overheats because it gets poor airflow on the bedsheets. It's also ergonomically wrong, because you're supporting your weight on your elbows while trying to type. It kinks the neck, and it's hard on your junk.
Ya can't lie on your side. One-handed typing. Blech.
Some kind of hospital tray perhaps with a laptop or a projection screen? Nope. Still no good because you have to sit up a bit.
What needs to be done is the keyboard needs to be split in half, and each chunk lies on each of your sides. Your arms rest on the bed, parallel to your body, with your fingers on the keyboard halves. A big screen (42" plasma) needs to be about 3-4 feet from your face, suspended from the ceiling with a slight angle.
What we really need is a decent voice command language that works for all aspects of computing. ie) Graphic manipulation, Cad, web browsing, e-mail, word processing, spreadsheeting, presentations, music composition, system administration, programming, and simple pr0n surfing. Imagine being able to fly through a pr0n tgp without having to lay a hand on a keyboard or a mouse. Woohoo!
Eye motion tracking and neural telepathy shit too. I'm all over that shit.
But until we can solve even that little problem of bedtime computing, we can't say that we've made it anywhere. And this glorified smartboard crap is just the same tired-old-shit being sold to bone-headed educational administrators who really can't afford it.
If you want to educate a bunch of slackers, hire more spastic/unstable male teachers. You know - the ones that seem to be easy-going and laid back and take endless amounts of bullshit from the students? Then all of a sudden they explode on some little shitrat in a rage of yelling and kicking desks. Wakes everyone-the-fuck-up and suddenly everyone's taking really good notes and really paying some good fucking attention.
Meanwhile, at City College of San Francisco, the teachers are fed up using "dumb" whiteboards that require endless numbers of dried-up ink markers, refuse to be wiped clean, or end up with permanent marks which interfere with their code presentations by introducing "fake terminators"!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This is motivation to go to Further Education which is optional, doesn't apply to compulsory education.
Introduced the year i went into Further Education, and i don't qualify damnit. It's means tested depending on your income to £30, £20 or £10 a week depending on where you come. Of course, it's nicely set to a very low level of income...
Why should some students get money and others not just because of how much money their parents have? Just because your parents have plenty of money doesn't mean they give it to you.
Parents with more money are paying more tax anyway, so give the EMA to everyone and parents pay an amount of it they can afford - that's how tax rates work.
Read The Flickering Mind by Todd Oppenheimer for a detailed analysis of the problem of technology in the classroom, especially in K-8 classrooms.
From the article:"If a kid wants to research boats they can do a PowerPoint presentation, a Word document or they can do a movie or slide show to show to the whole class."
Kids don't need to be spending their time learning fucking powerpoint or word. They need to be learning the fundamentals.
There's a reason Japanese schools have stuck with chalkboards and abacus's (abacii?)... they work.
This will make a bunch of tech companies and consultants a lot of money once they convince school boards that this technology is "vital" for kids' education, but in the end the kids won't benefit one damn bit.
Anyone remember the NEC e-Rate scam last year? Same shit, different year.
interactive whiteboards are cool and all but chalkboards with brains. I think we've discovered a new species
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
"As each child sketched their answers, the solutions were saved as separate files on the teacher's computer."
So much for drawing stupid shit when the teacher's not looking.
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"My dream school would have 7-foot-diagonal, in-wall units in every classroom."
me 2, thanks for the obvious allow students and teachers to share assignments, surf the web and edit video using their fingers as pens.
share what assignment? surf what web? Edit what video? You have textbook, notebook, VCR/DVD for those.
"A student asked if a worm had a brain. So I was able to do a quick Google search that had a diagram of an earthworm,"
wow so instead of you know the answer beforehand (provided that you are a bio teacher), you could just delagate the job to google. Good job, keep this up and I will replace you with a Perl Google search script.
My god
I'm going to be a senior in high school this September. For about 4 school years now, I've seen SMARTBoards in several rooms in my school. I've seen them used judiciously and to good effect -- for notes, for math equations, movies, you name it -- well, except for the goatse pranks. Our sysadmin makes sure we all have strong passwords, especially teachers.
And I live in Kamiah, Idaho. Apart from the schools, whose born-and-bred in California technology coordinator (aka our system admin) pulls down grants to keep the computers in tip-top shape and with the latest in good software, the majority of the town accesses the internet via the town library. Which, unless I'm very much mistaken, is running on dial-up that runs at less than 56k, even with a 56k modem equipped.
For the rest of us, broadband is a tricky proposition. All we have is wireless that costs a pretty penny to set up, so I only know of about three people who have it.
So forgive me for sounding uninterested, but wow, people are using smartboards. Big deal. Call me when they're doing something I haven't been accustomed to for going on 5 years now.
gamedrain: A weekly gaming/internet cultu
Hehe! We had a SmartBoard in every software engineering lab here at school for a couple year now. Those are pretty neat and usefull to make presentations on. Makes the presentations more active, which arent when you have to sit behind the computer and move the mouse around while talking. Zzzzz. I think the most interesting aspect are the color pens that come with it, so you can annotate things on the screen.
haha, love it (only while it sill points to a picture of a bastardised pumpkin that is!!)
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
This will last right up until an enterprising young person figures out how to background goatse with the caption "---- Teacher".
My main machine is a 300MHz Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM that I bought in 1997.
It runs MS-Windows 95 with no real problems.
Mozilla runs slowly if I have more than 40 or so tabs open (due to the 128 MB RAM, not CPU speed), but that's the only performance problem that I have.
I don't play the latest games (Q2 runs fine), but a school computer shouldn't be taking that into account anyway.
I have installed Mozilla, Python, cygwin, Blender, and other apps without too much difficulty.
(The only problems that I have had are with the GIMP and Adobe Acrobat Reader, neither of which support MSW95 anymore.
In those cases, I simply don't upgrade to the latest versions in MSW95.
(Your machines are running later versions of MSW, so you may not have this problem.))
Of course, since it's MS-Windows 95, I reboot every day or so as a preventive measure, but that's not really a big deal, and my understanding is that later versions of MS-Windows aren't that much more stable anyway.
(Plus, since I frequently use Linux (see next paragraph), it's unlikely anyway that I have MSW95 up long enough for it to start corroding to any appreciable extent.)
My machine also runs the latest version of GNU/Linux (Slackware) without too much fuss, for stuff that MSW95/cygwin can't handle.
(Gnome/KDE can be a little slow at times, depending on what I'm doing.)
The latest version of the GIMP runs fine here, and there are several PDF readers to handle the latest PDF file format (that the earlier version of Acrobat Reader can't handle in MSW95).
The main difficulty that I have with Linux is that I can't get my serial ports to work, which means that I can't access the modem, which means that I can't use the Internet from Linux.
If it weren't for that, I would be running Linux most of the time, and MSW95 only occasionally.
What I am trying to say with all of the preceding blathering is:
You don't need some multi-gigahertz gigabyte+ RAM machine with MS-Windows XP installed just to do basic schoolwork; your four-year-old computers should work just fine.
Just use the OS that came with them, rather than trying to upgrade to MS-Windows XP.
Make sure that you have applied all of the security patches for the software, and disable everything that's not necessary for getting the job done (e.g., turn off external DCOM (port 135), disable scripting in browsers, don't use IE and OE (use Mozilla instead), etc.).
You can also add peripherals (CD-RW drives go for < $30 these days (DVDs aren't necessary for schoolwork), and 80 GB hard drives are also cheap) to help extend the life of your machines.
And if you want to run the latest something, use Linux or BSD, the latest versions of which should run fine on older machines such as yours.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana