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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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
...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.
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
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
"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.
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
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
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.
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
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.