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0 pointsapplecrazy7y ago0 comments

I attend high school in the Bay Area and I'm surrounded by this Smartboard epidemic. Nearly every classroom at our school has one, but only around 10% of teachers actually use the "smart" portion, even though most of them have gotten some basic training in their proper usage. Most are used as dumb projectors for presentations and lectures, and the pens are seldom used. And keep in mind, this is Silicon Valley, the "cradle of tech innovation."

I find this to be an egregious waste of school funds, funds that could have gone towards funding school plays, improving school facilities, or expanding the engineering course offerings. And the real kicker is that my HS is an "arts magnet" school.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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alphydan7y ago

teacher here. Most smartboards are rubbish. The calibration fails constantly, it's really hard to draw on it ... and most "ready made" lessons for smartboards are usually boring. So I'm afraid it's a projector for me.

eat_veggies7y ago

The ready-made lessons are more shitty tech demos (Amazing! Drag and drop! Buttons! Computers!) to wow the administrators than actual lessons.

We have smart boards and chromebook carts in every room of my high school, and yet they canceled our fucking robotics team due to "lack of funding" and fired our oldest computer science teacher because his experience + degrees meant he cost them too much to employ [0]. Yes, I'm mad.

[0] https://de01903704.schoolwires.net/site/handlers/filedownloa...

applecrazyOP7y ago

You’re absolutely right, it’s absolutely admins seeing the “ooh shiny” aspect of these things. I have a feeling the company pushing these boards has really good salespeople.

And I’m an officer of a robotics team, so I feel your pain. We get zero funding from the school. Most money comes from members’ pockets or fundraisers. Eventually, we want to ease the burden on members by getting corporate sponsors, since we obviously won’t get any money from the school district, who’s busy cutting library budgets and buying smart boards.

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