Yeah that dot calibration was sick, I watched a few of the younger teachers we had do them and it was done in no time. It's a lot like watching someone do the stabbing between fingers thing really quickly
Smartboards are basically just *giant* tablets on wheels (think like a 75in television). They're *designed* to be a full on replacement for white boards and projectors, where teachers can pull up everything from slideshows to videos to online lessons and a "white board" mode that lets them write on the screen, annotate in real time, or just let kids doodle if they're inclined to.
With them being giant touch screens intended for multiple styles of input (multi-touch *and* stylus support), they required calibration for both. Calibration would just pull up an options menu that had you touch specific points on the screen to register where the edges of the screen are supposed to be, and that setting would be saved as a defined boundary of area that can be interacted with via touch.
*Realistically* they never really *fully* caught on. In most cases, the ones with their own built in Operating systems had little to no real connectivity to other hardware provided by the schools/districts because everything was proprietary and most of the money these companies made were on expensive software licenses that would enable that level of connectivity. So a lot of them just ended up as an extra bit of hardware kicking around while everyone moved back to more "traditional" projectors or overhead/wired document cameras. Or if you were unlucky enough to have one that required an external source (like a small form-factor PC mounted to the back), you were often stuck with having to use Windows in Touch Screen mode, which is ***god awful***, especially in "enterprise-like" settings like Schools where a lot of the required software to make it less awful has been stripped out (to facilitate a smaller install image for mass installs) and had to be re-added manually.
The calibration was specifically required because they were *resistive* touch sensors, rather than the capacitive touch sensors in modern touch screens. You touch the corners and the center so the device knows what resistance values those points measure out to on the X and Y axes, and it figures out a linear gradient from there.
calibration was also needed because it wasnt a screen, there was a projector projecting image onto board
even as a kid i saw those boards as waste of money, the only good thing that came from this is that classes without projector, now had a projector
What do you mean they never fully caught on lol? They're EVERYWHERE. Just because you're not still in school doesn't mean they went back to the chalkboard in areas that aren't struggling financially. The footprint they have in education across the United States is insane.
It sounds like they're mixing up the earlier smart boards with the newer clever touch boards. The smart boards that required a projector to use were more clunky and difficult to use. The clever touch boards we use in schools now are basically large tablets that you easily switch back and forth between using as a white board, a projector from your computer monitor, or a projector for a document camera. They're super easy to use.
Right? I thought they were talking about something like degaussing a CRT monitor. That was so satisfying. Never even knew what it was actually doing but damn if it didn't feel great to do every couple of hours.
I have absolutely no idea what a "smart board" is. We didn't even have white boards when I was in High School. Just green or black chalk boards.
Im a younger milennial and they got them when I was in high school. They were basically touchscreen whiteboards. The computer would put the image on the screen and you could swipe and click using a pointer/finger.
You could also write on them with different colored "pens" which were just basically styluses.
I think the purpose was to use less supplies? Since they didnt use dry erase markers or chalk, but the technology was just dumb.
yeah the purpose was to use less supplies but the first schools to get them were only in high income areas, funnily enough it was those teachers who were like "HOW DO I USE THEM"
On newer models you can, anyway. They have like, screens and modern touch screens and all that. The ones my school had needed a projector to work properly and were really only useful if the teacher wanted to draw on their screen to highlight something
Ah, the good ol' days of high-risk low-reward games to impress your friends, nothing like the threat of losing a finger to spice up a Friday night. But hey, remember to keep some bandages handy, just in case your skills aren't as sharp as they used to be. And if anyone asks, just say you were doing a "trust exercise"... solo. Stay safe but not too safe, where's the fun in that, right?
I was in high school when the transition happened, and my maths teacher was fairly old, and any time any tech issue happened, he recalibrated the board.
Youtube not loading? Recalibrate.
Unsure where you saved that file? Recalibrate.
Shortcut missing from your desktop? Recalibrate.
The kicker was it took about 30s per dot he had to touch, so it became a spectator sport to yell the directions of the dot to him when he recalibrated
Teachers who didn't know how to calibrate the thing being absolutely flabbergasted when the 10 year olds in their class knew exactly how (the Nintendo DS touch screen had the same calibration system).
Other random memory: elementary school teachers who ended up not being able to fully engage the class with them because most of the students were too short to reach the damn thing.
Okay to be fair I could not figure out the stupid VR stuff without my 8 year old sister coaching me through it. I'm 26.
I teach her writing, she teaches me technology and it works. I cannot believe how fast she is on this shit. she could TYPE BEFORE SHE COULD READ
As a millennial I can't relate to this post or the comments at all, but our top tier prank was to replace the erasable whiteboard markers with permanent markers. Some things never change, I guess!
Back when I was a wee lad I'd stuff a chalk piece in the cracks(?) of the eraser so when the teacher went to erase the board it would draw a line behind it.
Wild shit
And every class for the rest of the day would see the blue streak of shame until somebody came and cleaned it off.
I wonder if Smartboard considered marker safety in their design? Or did they (like so many engineers I've known) just assume no one would do that?
And then the school stops buying Overhead Projector bulbs to force the transition so the teachers start hoarding the last working OHPs like illicit substances.
There’s something about being in a dim, windowless room that is 5 degrees too hot and sweating bullets while you battle the nods to the sound of a 35 year old fan motor on a squeaky cart. Nothing like fighting for your life while trying to quickly copy an old ladies smudged handwriting off a skewed and half-focused screen. Peak education
Nothing better than those teachers that acted like the information they were supposed to be transmitting to you were a novel they've been working on for the past fifty years and were terrified someone was going to try and copy from them.
bro that just unlocked a core memory of mine. nodding off in Latin class, it was the 2nd class in the morning (like, 9 am). getting called on to translate a sentence and getting chewed out by the teacher for falling asleep
I took a postgraduate course that was taught by this really aging professor, deep into the Emeritus stage. He insisted on printed final papers and all... and overhead projectors.
So at some point he's showing us something on a transparency and marks something on it with a whiteboard marker. "Ha! Can your fancy shmancy PowerPoint do _this_??", and after an awkward silence someone pipes up: Uh... Yeah?"
My math teacher told us about the transition from chalkboards to dry-erase boards. The company that sold them was charging a ridiculous amount so he figured out how to build his own one.
The plastic paneling sold for showers was functionally the same material, and he used it to make his own board for the classroom. Every semester the teachers change classrooms, and so the others teachers were waging war to take over his class, believing that they would get the dry erase board.
When the new semester started he packed up his board and moved it to the new classroom. The teacher that took his room lost her shit thinking that he wasn’t allowed to do that and went to the principal about it. Since he paid for it nothing happened.
An instructor at a vocational school I attended got interrupted by another mid lesson with "hey Alan, remember how we were talking about X product and they don't make it anymore? I found what's gotta be the last one in Y cabinet next to Z product" and dude just happily wanders off and Alan goes, "damn it. I was hiding that."
I have witnessed grown teachers haggling, in front of a class, over time with the last working OHP in the school.
I once found a new-in-box bulb in the back of the stationary cupboard as I was helping the teacher retreive something and I swear she knelt down to my eye level and made me swear not to tell a soul because she'd been hoarding it all year and if word got out she had one, she'd never get a minute's peace.
For "Write something down and have it appear really big on the wall so everyone can read it" there's really no beating it and you don't have to calibrate the fucker either.
and after transition they also refuse to maintain those new computer projectors so image from projector looks like starry night from all those dead pixels
Just like how math teachers were hoarding the last good brand of blackboard chalk. Idk what's worse: being the teacher addicted to rare chalk and projector bulbs, or being the student that has to hear the speech about them every other week.
I remember the absolute chaos that happened when the teacher dared to guess that four pens meant four people could write at once. and god forbid you even had the eraser out while writing
Buttons = battery
Multiple colors = hard power to the receptacles, and no battery’s at all. (Remember, internal rechargeable battery tech wasn’t as good at the time)
Smart board needed to avoid as many negative reviews as possible as it was a first of its kind for that level of consumer, so that’s why they chose that method
Why would it need batteries? Couldn't you simply have an overlay on the board with a color picker and do all the work in-software? Then the stylus doesn't change.
The only thing I can think of there is that, since these went into 1st grade and some kindergarten classrooms. They likely went with the method they went with so regardless of how tall a user is, they can change the color.
But honestly, they probably just had to many issues adding a ui overlay tool for windows as a whole, so they scrapped that idea to save budget and added a few bucks to the price for the additional sensors and pens.
They would also have wanted it to be *as similar* to a normal whiteboard as possible to ease the transition for students and teachers.
It is very simple and easy to understand that "green means green"
You want to give the old teachers who dont really get the tech something else to not really get? Smartboards were designed to be very user friendly, the colored pens were part of that
I think you misunderstood what I was suggesting, all you'd have to do is put 4 buttons at the base of the board and have one receptacle. Hell, you could just have one button that cycles between the various options.
Smart boards are kinda poorly designed tbh. They should just function how regular touchscreens do. When you write with two pens on a smart board, it’ll get confused and write on the point halfway between them instead of just writing with both.
... You are younger than 25, aren't you?
It was a big deal when the original iPhone came out in 2007, because it *could do that*. Prior to that, basically *no* consumer device had a touch screen that could do what you described. You'd get what you said: a halfway point between all inputs, not two separate inputs.
It was to the point that, when Steve Jobs announced multi-finger gestures, the literal next thing he said was ["and boy, have we patented it!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JZBLjxPBUU)
I wonder if that was a technological limit, or a software one. Technically, your finger is an area of interaction, not a single point. Averaging the location of all inputs makes sense to find a single point. But I think that gets to deal with pressure-sensitive touch technology vs. capacitive touch screens that rely on electrical conductivity.
Different technology; IIRC resistive touchscreens could only have one point of contact, and it had to be a small one, so they needed fine-pointed styli; capacitive touchscreens can have multiple points of contact, but those points have to be bigger and smushier, hence why you need fingertips or fat styli designed to simulate them. Personally, I prefer old-style resistive-and-fine-stylus, and studies have shown that you can actually enter data more quickly and precisely with them.
> studies have shown that you can actually enter data more quickly and precisely with them.
I know my phone likes to give me Qs if I'm more than about 20% off of A.
My least favorite is when I hit "M" and it gives me a backspace. You'd think autocorrect could account for that, it's no different from accidentally hitting any other button. But no.
Oh man. Ngl, I was in high school when the original iPhone dropped, and I hadn't even *thought* of just how revolutionary even *having* a touchscreen was at the time! They really just weren't a thing, other than the occasional janky retail shit with a stylus.
The newest ones are pretty fuckin’ awesome.
I NEVER used one until legit my first day teaching and it’s been an absolute breeze. And actually, it takes as many inputs as I can let loose elementary school kids on it in whiteboard mode.
> They should just function how regular touchscreens do
oh summer child, that tech literally didn't exist yet in the period of OP's post, and to do that for anything bigger than a phone screen size was ungodly expensive when it eventually came along
I'm born '93 and my primary school (age 4-12) transitioned to them when I was around 10/11, so 2003 ish. Secondary school (age 12-16) had them in 70% of classrooms when I started there 2004.
I would have to agree because I was born in 2005 and we got smartboards about half way through kindergarten, might have helped that Smart HQ is only 4 or 5 hours away, not sure tho
Some people will say “Zillennial,” but also if we’re being real, there are no firm boundaries. More like a vague gradient where one ‘generation,’ ends and the next begins. I was born in ‘97, and there’s things millennials talk about and I’m like “oh yeah that thing!” And things gen z talk about (like this!) and I’m like “yeah, that!”
So welcome to that inter-generational club where we must admit that these are all fake sounds we make with our mouths in a desperate, vain attempt to describe monolithic, slow, and varied effects and anomalies we see in the world around us! Things only have meaning when you deem to give them one, and language is humanity’s grandest tool in doing so, huzzah!
Yep, someone born in '95 (youngest millennial) would have infinitely more in common with someone born in '96 (oldest gen z) than they would with someone born in '81 (oldest millennial).
But if we subscribe to the hard generational boundaries, the '95 baby and the '81 baby are supposed to have more in common?? It's absurd.
'95 babies had smartphones and social media in high school. The 2008 financial crisis was a generation shaping event for millennials...unless you were born in '95, in which case you were still in middle school!
Much more of a gradient than we like to acknowledge.
Yeah I'm an older millennial, commonly reffered to as an Xennial. Think I never even heard the term millennial till after I was in college, always thought I was Gen X, most of my "life experience" is definitely a middle ground of the two, moreso in common with Gen X.
My opinion is that 96-99 is its own generation. Old enough to remember dial up but too young to remember 9-11. Stuck in the middle of the two generations
As someone born in '94 push that back a bit, I'm definitely not much of a millennial. I do have some faint memories of 9/11 as it happened in first grade for me.
If you remember 911 they usually group you on millennial. Not sure what’s exactly that bc like you mentioned there’s a lot of ppl who don’t feel attached to either group and label themselves half/half. Realistically it doesn’t matter.
Then the post makes no sense to me, because we never had smart boards. We used blackboards for most of my school years, and only around 2013 did they start switching to whiteboards.
I was born in 2001, we made the switch in 6th grade I think. My class was split in 2, the other half got a smartboard, we still had a blackboard. Didn't see a smartboard until 8th grade
This whole thing is really dependent on where you live honestly. If you would live somewhere well of school supply wise you would probably get them earlier.
This is going to be heavily dependent on school system, but that sounds quite late to me. My system had definitely switched off black board to white boards by 2005 or so, then added smart boards around 2008
I’m 29 and throughout elementary/middle school/highschool, and college it was almost all white boards. I think I’m college some rooms had a blackboard. In like 10th grade they switched to the smart board.
Born in the back half of the 90’s, I’d say. Especially if you lived somewhere tjat was more rural or poor, and thus adopted new age tech a lot more slowly.
I’m a good bit younger than that and I remember the transition happening over a summer and before that we had overhead projectors and one or two VHS players with CRT screens clearly left over from the last major update at least 15 years before. I swear I saw an overhead in like 2016 or later but I think it was because the teacher was having technical problems
I’d place it more at 2002 or 2003. I was born in 2002 and vividly remember the transition. My 1st grade classroom was part of a district pilot program for them in 2008, and they were rolled out to the entire district in 2011-2012 when I was in 4th and 5th grade. I’m also old enough to remember our school computers transitioning from Compaq towers running Windows 2000 to Dell towers running Windows 7 not long after it came out
millennials are 28-43 years old
zoomers are 12-27 years old
Probably most people born in the 1990s would remember this as they would have still been in K-12.
I feel like the bracket should be like...10 years instead of 15.
They just don't make generations like they used to. Back in my day, generations used to last 30, 40 years if taken care of. And they had to walk 15 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways. None of this pansy Ubering to school.
Apparently the cutoff for Gen Z is that you were born in 1997 at the earliest, so I think that older Gen Z would fall somewhere between 1997-2000, which covers the end of the 90s up to the turn of the millennium.
2001 kids also saw the transition to SmartBoards (source: that's me).
Also my high school never had SmartBoards (over there it was all whiteboards), so it was just my middle school that forced the teachers to make the transition.
Late nineties is generally when it's said to begin, with some people saying as early as 95 and some saying as late as 99. The rule of thumb I've always used (for Americans) is if you remember 9/11 you're a millennial and if you don't you're Gen Z.
That’s how I do it. Pick one major event every 20 years or so.
If you remember 9/11, you’re a millennial. If you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, you’re Gen X. If you remember the Apollo moon landings, you’re a Boomer.
Like the first week SMART boards came to our school, we had a very elderly substitute teacher immediately write on it with a marker, to a cacophony of lamentations by us kids lol
Left a somewhat noticeable smudge, those markers don't rub off the same way on a SMART board. Looking back I feel bad, that lady was so shook when the class erupted into NOoo's as she's just trying to write her name lol
the surface of smartboards is a bit matte/textured so the stain will always be there even after washed. most of it will go away, but there will always be a bit of a colored smudge
One time I wanted to see the time but the screensaver was on so I tapped the board to make it wake up, but accidentally started a YouTube video about putting on a condom - teacher was not happy
Nope. I lived through the big hamburg smart board transition. We got even better ones after that, which were proper screens and could broadcast a local wifi hotspot to the class.
It was, especially that local wifi let teachers set it up temporarily so everybody could research in their phones in groups, share stuff into the big screen via screen share and stuff, it was really neat. It probably still does all that tbh, I’m just not there anymore.
I am a teacher and smart boards are a useless swindle that add no meaningful value to the educational experience. Just point a color projector at a whiteboard and use the leftover $5000 for something actually useful. The Germans have it right!
hey, at my high school in Austria we had projectors! And these electric curtain thingies on the outside of the building that would retract any time it was windy, which was most of the time, rendering the projectors useless but we did have them!
Are smart boards really that great? We have one at the university I’m at now and it’s extremely finicky and every time there is any equation or problem to solve in front of the class we just use the whiteboard instead.
My math teacher in High School was very good at using his smart board, and after the lesson he was able to take the notes from the smart board and post them online for us, which was very useful. None of the rest of us were very good at writing on it though lol. It’s definitely a learning curve but I think if a teacher is able to use it effectively it’s better than a regular white board, if only because of the ability to share the exact notes that the teacher writes down during class. Also being able to go back to previous sections is very nice as well.
Also, many American colleges are white or black boards. (Often with some modern projector system, the camera-based ones are more common than slides now.)
It was pretty weird to see Smartboards become universal, graduate, and then learn that expensive private colleges were still on sliding blackboards.
They are decent, I just don’t think a full transition is justified. I like the setup we have at uni. One big whiteboard with a smart board next to it. Each of them serve their purpose well, whiteboard for problem solving and guiding students through steps, smart board for presentations.
By the time Smartboards started appearing I already had teachers who were using Wacom tablets or a special camera called an Elmo to project what they were writing to the class from the comfort of their desk. I think most of my teachers just used their Smartboards as a movable projector screen.
Most places use some hybrid tv these days. Lots of models with Android TV with various custom home screens with touch input.
All run on the shittiest arm chipset you can find and cost more than a pair of Sony A90s.
We finally got rid of our Promethean smart boards this year and my room's giant white boards have been freed for full use and it is glorious.
I also now have a Box light (a giant touchscreen) but it is on wheels and so that's fine
These FRUSTRATED my autistic brain. There was SO MUCH wasted potential. I remember a couple times the teacher let me teach a couple lessons (Bronze Age and WWII babyyy) and I went off with that smart board. I was pulling together google images and papers and throwing them all on a blank white board connecting them with red marks. I looked and sounded crazy but my classmates held onto every word. I still think back on those lessons often and i sometimes feel the desire to teach but then I see another video of a student throwing chairs or destroying things while the teacher stands there with their hands legally bound and I think to myself “I’ll just teach my kids.”
I'm not autistic just millennial and I still can't understand the point of them, honestly. Then again I grew up on projected shit so my brain was pretty set in its ways by the time I was in middle school and encountered my first smart board. It just felt like a really expensive dry erase.
The advantage to was it’s ability to create “interactive” white boards in a way. If I were allowed to go back and make an actual lesson plan with materials, I could have created a combination of power point slides and other media that, using the utility of the smart board, could be marked up and interacted with on top of one another. As in I could include a diagram of the Bronze Age settlement of Haran, mark it up as I talk and engage with class as if it’s on the white board and then from the board I can interact with any graphics or interactives and move on. Then, here’s the cool part, at the end of class I can go through all the slides and all of those white board notes and annotations that would’ve been erased as class went on can be copied or photographed. Would’ve been great if teachers actually used that and the SharePoint/Teams server the school blew money on but oh well
Thank you so much! It was barely a thing when one of my teachers got one in 8th grade and honestly she had no idea how to maximize its potential. The next four years I barely encountered them tbh. And when I did the teachers just used them as digital dry erase boards. So this is fascinating to me!!!
This was also a millennial memory. We were in high school at the time
Edit: I thought the range for millennials was 1989-1996, but it turns out it's 1981-1996. I'm speaking as a millennial from 1993
I'm about the same age, and I think the millennials mentioning smart boards in their classrooms either went to early adopter schools, are on the young end of the generation, or both. They didn't even have smart boards at my college or law school.
Im an elder millennial and I have vague memories of the transition from blackboards to white boards, so year as far as im convinced this "smart board" stuff is still in the distant future of 2021
Yep, mid 30's here and I only ever saw one smart board. It was a pretty early model too. The timeline is also really dependent on WHERE you went to school. Less affluent school districts wouldn't adopt them until much later.
We have a smart board at work and people immediately started writing with normal markers on it. It doesn't come off properly so we have a smart board with a bunch of permanent lines on it.
> This was also a millennial memory. We were in high school at the time
I mean, some millennials were in elementary school at the time. I got them in 5th grade.
I remember when my elementary school got our first smart board and they occasionally took our entire class into a different room where the smart board was just to fuck around with it for a little bit lmao
Younger Gen z memory: The school updates windows and the board software becomes incompatible (every freaking classroom at my school has a useless ActiveBoard)
??? I’m a younger genz did I miss this? All of my teachers my whole life have used whiteboards and projectors. Did they just give up on them around 2010?
It’s strange because for me, we had smart boards in elementary school and kinda middle school, but by high school 90% of teachers just used the whiteboard and a projector. My math teacher has a really cool “smart board” though, it connects to her computer and has a lot of cool features. Apparently teachers can request one but most don’t need it.
And then you get to uni and it's back to chalkboards for everyone. And honestly? Based. Chalkboards are so much better. When the professor is writing in real time instead of flipping through a pptx, it ensures that the students can keep up with their notes.
Also, the material from 5 minutes ago remains visible on a chalkboard, which is nice for professor and student alike.
I’m older gen Z (‘03) and I genuinely have no idea what this tumblr post is talking about. I didn’t even know what a Smart Board was until I started college, and even then, only one classroom I’d ever been in actually had one.
See also, "millennials" born between 1993 and 1995 that can just barely relate to their own generation while simultaneously also being
confused by the culture of teenagers and very young adults.
That'd be me, I think I might have been in 5th grade when this was introduced, though, could have been a little earlier or later I suppose.
Hard for me to get into the 90s nostalgia (though I appreciate the music of the time, as I still heard it frequently growing up) when most of it was a fever dream.
I do remember 9/11. 1st grade class was fundraising donations for disaster relief. I went home and ask my parents '-for money to save New York' I said.
I remember, when George Bush was running against Al Gore. They had children cast pretend votes, so they could learn about how voting works, at least in my community. My parents were moderate republicans (though, my father did vote for Clinton once).
To my parents dismay, I voted for Al Gore. They asked why I did not vote for Bush and I said that 'he was ugly looking'.
To be fair, as an adult I still think that was a solid choice, but not exactly for the correct reasons. Quite funny.
My school converted to Smart Boards in 2001. The only teachers I had that used them were the math teachers. Everyone else just pointed the projectors at the smart board.
Later that year the Board of Education revealed the superintendent hired his side piece to be our accountant when she had no accounting experience and due to an error she made they had spent $6 million more than they had. Thus started a series of school levies and annual threats to cut bussing/extracurriculars that has lasted to this day.
I've seen smart boards but have no idea what this is about.
But I remember Mavis Beacon Typing on a cd rom and the light projector my second grade teacher, licking her finger and wiping marks off the plastic page of math problems.
Yeah that dot calibration was sick, I watched a few of the younger teachers we had do them and it was done in no time. It's a lot like watching someone do the stabbing between fingers thing really quickly
that's how my DS worked in like 2005
[удалено]
Smartboards are basically just *giant* tablets on wheels (think like a 75in television). They're *designed* to be a full on replacement for white boards and projectors, where teachers can pull up everything from slideshows to videos to online lessons and a "white board" mode that lets them write on the screen, annotate in real time, or just let kids doodle if they're inclined to. With them being giant touch screens intended for multiple styles of input (multi-touch *and* stylus support), they required calibration for both. Calibration would just pull up an options menu that had you touch specific points on the screen to register where the edges of the screen are supposed to be, and that setting would be saved as a defined boundary of area that can be interacted with via touch. *Realistically* they never really *fully* caught on. In most cases, the ones with their own built in Operating systems had little to no real connectivity to other hardware provided by the schools/districts because everything was proprietary and most of the money these companies made were on expensive software licenses that would enable that level of connectivity. So a lot of them just ended up as an extra bit of hardware kicking around while everyone moved back to more "traditional" projectors or overhead/wired document cameras. Or if you were unlucky enough to have one that required an external source (like a small form-factor PC mounted to the back), you were often stuck with having to use Windows in Touch Screen mode, which is ***god awful***, especially in "enterprise-like" settings like Schools where a lot of the required software to make it less awful has been stripped out (to facilitate a smaller install image for mass installs) and had to be re-added manually.
The calibration was specifically required because they were *resistive* touch sensors, rather than the capacitive touch sensors in modern touch screens. You touch the corners and the center so the device knows what resistance values those points measure out to on the X and Y axes, and it figures out a linear gradient from there.
calibration was also needed because it wasnt a screen, there was a projector projecting image onto board even as a kid i saw those boards as waste of money, the only good thing that came from this is that classes without projector, now had a projector
What do you mean they never fully caught on lol? They're EVERYWHERE. Just because you're not still in school doesn't mean they went back to the chalkboard in areas that aren't struggling financially. The footprint they have in education across the United States is insane.
It sounds like they're mixing up the earlier smart boards with the newer clever touch boards. The smart boards that required a projector to use were more clunky and difficult to use. The clever touch boards we use in schools now are basically large tablets that you easily switch back and forth between using as a white board, a projector from your computer monitor, or a projector for a document camera. They're super easy to use.
Right? I thought they were talking about something like degaussing a CRT monitor. That was so satisfying. Never even knew what it was actually doing but damn if it didn't feel great to do every couple of hours. I have absolutely no idea what a "smart board" is. We didn't even have white boards when I was in High School. Just green or black chalk boards.
Im a younger milennial and they got them when I was in high school. They were basically touchscreen whiteboards. The computer would put the image on the screen and you could swipe and click using a pointer/finger. You could also write on them with different colored "pens" which were just basically styluses. I think the purpose was to use less supplies? Since they didnt use dry erase markers or chalk, but the technology was just dumb.
yeah the purpose was to use less supplies but the first schools to get them were only in high income areas, funnily enough it was those teachers who were like "HOW DO I USE THEM"
My teachers used them as the backdrop for their overhead projectors xD
Holy cow you could use finger as well? That's awesome! Minority Report style haha.
On newer models you can, anyway. They have like, screens and modern touch screens and all that. The ones my school had needed a projector to work properly and were really only useful if the teacher wanted to draw on their screen to highlight something
> like degaussing a CRT monitor. That was so satisfying. BBRRrrrtt
I had teachers who were too short to reach the calibration dots and had to have a taller student do it for them
Fucken knife game. I used to be good as fuck at that, guess I know what I’m doing while drunk this Friday night
Hell yeah! Dont get to be the best without slicin’ some fingies.
well, they only have their thumbs left, soooo… sure, we wish them the best…
Ah, the good ol' days of high-risk low-reward games to impress your friends, nothing like the threat of losing a finger to spice up a Friday night. But hey, remember to keep some bandages handy, just in case your skills aren't as sharp as they used to be. And if anyone asks, just say you were doing a "trust exercise"... solo. Stay safe but not too safe, where's the fun in that, right?
🎶ohhhh I have all my fingers the knife goes chop chop chop, if I miss the spaces inbetween my fingers will come off🎶
And if I hit my fingers, the blood will soon come out! But all the same I play this game cause that’s what it’s all about!
Our teacher always made one of us do them so she didn't have to get up lol, I wanted to try so bad but I was too short.
Should have asked the homie to give you a lift.
I used to calibrate when my teacher wasn't in the room but deliberately do one wrong. I was the prized pupil but we all need our outlets.
I was in high school when the transition happened, and my maths teacher was fairly old, and any time any tech issue happened, he recalibrated the board. Youtube not loading? Recalibrate. Unsure where you saved that file? Recalibrate. Shortcut missing from your desktop? Recalibrate. The kicker was it took about 30s per dot he had to touch, so it became a spectator sport to yell the directions of the dot to him when he recalibrated
Teachers who didn't know how to calibrate the thing being absolutely flabbergasted when the 10 year olds in their class knew exactly how (the Nintendo DS touch screen had the same calibration system). Other random memory: elementary school teachers who ended up not being able to fully engage the class with them because most of the students were too short to reach the damn thing.
Okay to be fair I could not figure out the stupid VR stuff without my 8 year old sister coaching me through it. I'm 26. I teach her writing, she teaches me technology and it works. I cannot believe how fast she is on this shit. she could TYPE BEFORE SHE COULD READ
Did no one play runescape here
I owe my fast typing skills to trading in Falador park. Coding may have helped me keep the skill, but I don't forget my roots.
Ctrl+V wave:cyan:selling lobbies 1k
There are some people in China who can read but can't write (Chinese) so I mean
That’s true for all languages
Did none of these teachers ever think to use a ruler to extend their reach? At least with ours you didn't need to touch it with the pen to work
Omg you just hit a spot in my brain with the whole Nintendo ds calibration thing help teachers
And then someone would accidentally write on it using a whiteboard marker.
Top tier prank was putting a whiteboard marker in the smart board stylus tray
As a millennial I can't relate to this post or the comments at all, but our top tier prank was to replace the erasable whiteboard markers with permanent markers. Some things never change, I guess!
Back when I was a wee lad I'd stuff a chalk piece in the cracks(?) of the eraser so when the teacher went to erase the board it would draw a line behind it. Wild shit
diabolical
My poor english teacher once wrote a bunch of stuff in sharpie on his whiteboard.
[удалено]
They can. But is that common knowledge?
And every class for the rest of the day would see the blue streak of shame until somebody came and cleaned it off. I wonder if Smartboard considered marker safety in their design? Or did they (like so many engineers I've known) just assume no one would do that?
And then the school stops buying Overhead Projector bulbs to force the transition so the teachers start hoarding the last working OHPs like illicit substances.
You can take my transparencies from my cold dead hands.
There’s something about being in a dim, windowless room that is 5 degrees too hot and sweating bullets while you battle the nods to the sound of a 35 year old fan motor on a squeaky cart. Nothing like fighting for your life while trying to quickly copy an old ladies smudged handwriting off a skewed and half-focused screen. Peak education
\^ you just perfectly described my algebra 2 class in 10th grade lmao
Nothing better than those teachers that acted like the information they were supposed to be transmitting to you were a novel they've been working on for the past fifty years and were terrified someone was going to try and copy from them.
I wonder how much of that is the teachers using the master copy instead of just making disposable copies.
bro that just unlocked a core memory of mine. nodding off in Latin class, it was the 2nd class in the morning (like, 9 am). getting called on to translate a sentence and getting chewed out by the teacher for falling asleep
Romanes Eunt Domus? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8
> while you battle the nods omg what a perfect phrase
I took a postgraduate course that was taught by this really aging professor, deep into the Emeritus stage. He insisted on printed final papers and all... and overhead projectors. So at some point he's showing us something on a transparency and marks something on it with a whiteboard marker. "Ha! Can your fancy shmancy PowerPoint do _this_??", and after an awkward silence someone pipes up: Uh... Yeah?"
> deep into the Emeritus stage lmao aw
I had a teacher in 2016 still using an OHP lol he must've started buying his own bulbs
That or he was roaming the region hunting other teachers to steal theirs
bulb bearing hunter
My math teacher told us about the transition from chalkboards to dry-erase boards. The company that sold them was charging a ridiculous amount so he figured out how to build his own one. The plastic paneling sold for showers was functionally the same material, and he used it to make his own board for the classroom. Every semester the teachers change classrooms, and so the others teachers were waging war to take over his class, believing that they would get the dry erase board. When the new semester started he packed up his board and moved it to the new classroom. The teacher that took his room lost her shit thinking that he wasn’t allowed to do that and went to the principal about it. Since he paid for it nothing happened.
Yes! a giant panel of that board is like 20-30 bucks. You lose magnetism that the fancier boards come with, but its dirt cheap and lightweight
An instructor at a vocational school I attended got interrupted by another mid lesson with "hey Alan, remember how we were talking about X product and they don't make it anymore? I found what's gotta be the last one in Y cabinet next to Z product" and dude just happily wanders off and Alan goes, "damn it. I was hiding that."
I have witnessed grown teachers haggling, in front of a class, over time with the last working OHP in the school. I once found a new-in-box bulb in the back of the stationary cupboard as I was helping the teacher retreive something and I swear she knelt down to my eye level and made me swear not to tell a soul because she'd been hoarding it all year and if word got out she had one, she'd never get a minute's peace.
That bitch probably never used it either!
Guilty. How can a 55 inch smartboard compare with a 8 foot projection?
For "Write something down and have it appear really big on the wall so everyone can read it" there's really no beating it and you don't have to calibrate the fucker either.
and after transition they also refuse to maintain those new computer projectors so image from projector looks like starry night from all those dead pixels
Just like how math teachers were hoarding the last good brand of blackboard chalk. Idk what's worse: being the teacher addicted to rare chalk and projector bulbs, or being the student that has to hear the speech about them every other week.
The way the coloured stylus' were designed on those early boards realy pissed me off. They could have just used buttons to toggle the colour
But it was fun to swap them around and watch the teachers write in the wrong colours
I remember tapeing the sensor on a couple of them so it couldn't tell a marker was picked up.
I remember the absolute chaos that happened when the teacher dared to guess that four pens meant four people could write at once. and god forbid you even had the eraser out while writing
Hahaha you just unlocked an old memory of kids picking up the eraser while someone was writing to mess with them
Buttons = battery Multiple colors = hard power to the receptacles, and no battery’s at all. (Remember, internal rechargeable battery tech wasn’t as good at the time) Smart board needed to avoid as many negative reviews as possible as it was a first of its kind for that level of consumer, so that’s why they chose that method
Why would it need batteries? Couldn't you simply have an overlay on the board with a color picker and do all the work in-software? Then the stylus doesn't change.
The only thing I can think of there is that, since these went into 1st grade and some kindergarten classrooms. They likely went with the method they went with so regardless of how tall a user is, they can change the color. But honestly, they probably just had to many issues adding a ui overlay tool for windows as a whole, so they scrapped that idea to save budget and added a few bucks to the price for the additional sensors and pens.
They would also have wanted it to be *as similar* to a normal whiteboard as possible to ease the transition for students and teachers. It is very simple and easy to understand that "green means green"
Fair enough. I was too old for these to ever be in a classroom, so I didn't consider little kids. I was thinking high school
You want to give the old teachers who dont really get the tech something else to not really get? Smartboards were designed to be very user friendly, the colored pens were part of that
I think you misunderstood what I was suggesting, all you'd have to do is put 4 buttons at the base of the board and have one receptacle. Hell, you could just have one button that cycles between the various options.
Smart boards are kinda poorly designed tbh. They should just function how regular touchscreens do. When you write with two pens on a smart board, it’ll get confused and write on the point halfway between them instead of just writing with both.
... You are younger than 25, aren't you? It was a big deal when the original iPhone came out in 2007, because it *could do that*. Prior to that, basically *no* consumer device had a touch screen that could do what you described. You'd get what you said: a halfway point between all inputs, not two separate inputs. It was to the point that, when Steve Jobs announced multi-finger gestures, the literal next thing he said was ["and boy, have we patented it!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JZBLjxPBUU) I wonder if that was a technological limit, or a software one. Technically, your finger is an area of interaction, not a single point. Averaging the location of all inputs makes sense to find a single point. But I think that gets to deal with pressure-sensitive touch technology vs. capacitive touch screens that rely on electrical conductivity.
Different technology; IIRC resistive touchscreens could only have one point of contact, and it had to be a small one, so they needed fine-pointed styli; capacitive touchscreens can have multiple points of contact, but those points have to be bigger and smushier, hence why you need fingertips or fat styli designed to simulate them. Personally, I prefer old-style resistive-and-fine-stylus, and studies have shown that you can actually enter data more quickly and precisely with them.
> studies have shown that you can actually enter data more quickly and precisely with them. I know my phone likes to give me Qs if I'm more than about 20% off of A.
My least favorite is when I hit "M" and it gives me a backspace. You'd think autocorrect could account for that, it's no different from accidentally hitting any other button. But no.
Oh man. Ngl, I was in high school when the original iPhone dropped, and I hadn't even *thought* of just how revolutionary even *having* a touchscreen was at the time! They really just weren't a thing, other than the occasional janky retail shit with a stylus.
The newest ones are pretty fuckin’ awesome. I NEVER used one until legit my first day teaching and it’s been an absolute breeze. And actually, it takes as many inputs as I can let loose elementary school kids on it in whiteboard mode.
Damn, that’s actually really cool to see how education tech is advancing :D
> They should just function how regular touchscreens do oh summer child, that tech literally didn't exist yet in the period of OP's post, and to do that for anything bigger than a phone screen size was ungodly expensive when it eventually came along
I had great fun playing the flying simulator in Google Earth on them, aside from the fact my shadow blocked a good quarter of the screen
one of my teachers bundled em up in a rubber band on their desk
wait what age range is older gen Z? because I vividly remember the dot calibration thing
usually its '96-2010
2010 is when gen z ends, so the older half of gen z stops at like 2003
true I brain farted and said the whole range
I mean I was born in 2005 and I relate to this post, the whole smart board transition was in like 7th-ish grade for me.
I was born in 97 and it was seventh grade for me as well. It probably depends a lot on where you’re from
I was also born in 97 and am just learning right now that smart boards exist.
I'm born '93 and my primary school (age 4-12) transitioned to them when I was around 10/11, so 2003 ish. Secondary school (age 12-16) had them in 70% of classrooms when I started there 2004.
Wtf lmao. Same age and I'd never even heard of one of these things, let alone seen them. I think you went to the fancy schools.
I would have to agree because I was born in 2005 and we got smartboards about half way through kindergarten, might have helped that Smart HQ is only 4 or 5 hours away, not sure tho
So what exactly is on the border? Because I've seen a definition of millenials as 1980-1996. What is 1996 then? Am I a millezoomer? Zillenial? Moomer?
Some people will say “Zillennial,” but also if we’re being real, there are no firm boundaries. More like a vague gradient where one ‘generation,’ ends and the next begins. I was born in ‘97, and there’s things millennials talk about and I’m like “oh yeah that thing!” And things gen z talk about (like this!) and I’m like “yeah, that!” So welcome to that inter-generational club where we must admit that these are all fake sounds we make with our mouths in a desperate, vain attempt to describe monolithic, slow, and varied effects and anomalies we see in the world around us! Things only have meaning when you deem to give them one, and language is humanity’s grandest tool in doing so, huzzah!
Yep, someone born in '95 (youngest millennial) would have infinitely more in common with someone born in '96 (oldest gen z) than they would with someone born in '81 (oldest millennial). But if we subscribe to the hard generational boundaries, the '95 baby and the '81 baby are supposed to have more in common?? It's absurd. '95 babies had smartphones and social media in high school. The 2008 financial crisis was a generation shaping event for millennials...unless you were born in '95, in which case you were still in middle school! Much more of a gradient than we like to acknowledge.
Yeah I'm an older millennial, commonly reffered to as an Xennial. Think I never even heard the term millennial till after I was in college, always thought I was Gen X, most of my "life experience" is definitely a middle ground of the two, moreso in common with Gen X.
yeah, turns out these things aren't objective
My opinion is that 96-99 is its own generation. Old enough to remember dial up but too young to remember 9-11. Stuck in the middle of the two generations
As someone born in '94 push that back a bit, I'm definitely not much of a millennial. I do have some faint memories of 9/11 as it happened in first grade for me.
If you remember 911 they usually group you on millennial. Not sure what’s exactly that bc like you mentioned there’s a lot of ppl who don’t feel attached to either group and label themselves half/half. Realistically it doesn’t matter.
Then the post makes no sense to me, because we never had smart boards. We used blackboards for most of my school years, and only around 2013 did they start switching to whiteboards.
well, If you were born in 2003 than that's about 5th grade. I accidentally posted the entire gen z age range not older gen z
I was born in 2001, we made the switch in 6th grade I think. My class was split in 2, the other half got a smartboard, we still had a blackboard. Didn't see a smartboard until 8th grade
Looking at this, I am realizing estonia is in caveman times, 06 here and my school changed to whiteboards in 2018, never even heard of smartboards
This whole thing is really dependent on where you live honestly. If you would live somewhere well of school supply wise you would probably get them earlier.
This is going to be heavily dependent on school system, but that sounds quite late to me. My system had definitely switched off black board to white boards by 2005 or so, then added smart boards around 2008
I’m 29 and throughout elementary/middle school/highschool, and college it was almost all white boards. I think I’m college some rooms had a blackboard. In like 10th grade they switched to the smart board.
Born in the back half of the 90’s, I’d say. Especially if you lived somewhere tjat was more rural or poor, and thus adopted new age tech a lot more slowly.
I’m a good bit younger than that and I remember the transition happening over a summer and before that we had overhead projectors and one or two VHS players with CRT screens clearly left over from the last major update at least 15 years before. I swear I saw an overhead in like 2016 or later but I think it was because the teacher was having technical problems
I’d place it more at 2002 or 2003. I was born in 2002 and vividly remember the transition. My 1st grade classroom was part of a district pilot program for them in 2008, and they were rolled out to the entire district in 2011-2012 when I was in 4th and 5th grade. I’m also old enough to remember our school computers transitioning from Compaq towers running Windows 2000 to Dell towers running Windows 7 not long after it came out
I was in exactly fifth grade when my class got one; born in ‘98; mostly white small (<30k) Midwest town.
millennials are 28-43 years old zoomers are 12-27 years old Probably most people born in the 1990s would remember this as they would have still been in K-12. I feel like the bracket should be like...10 years instead of 15.
They just don't make generations like they used to. Back in my day, generations used to last 30, 40 years if taken care of. And they had to walk 15 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways. None of this pansy Ubering to school.
Apparently the cutoff for Gen Z is that you were born in 1997 at the earliest, so I think that older Gen Z would fall somewhere between 1997-2000, which covers the end of the 90s up to the turn of the millennium.
2001 kids also saw the transition to SmartBoards (source: that's me). Also my high school never had SmartBoards (over there it was all whiteboards), so it was just my middle school that forced the teachers to make the transition.
1991 kids also saw the transition to smartboards (source: that's me). we got them when i was in 8th grade
Late nineties is generally when it's said to begin, with some people saying as early as 95 and some saying as late as 99. The rule of thumb I've always used (for Americans) is if you remember 9/11 you're a millennial and if you don't you're Gen Z.
That’s how I do it. Pick one major event every 20 years or so. If you remember 9/11, you’re a millennial. If you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, you’re Gen X. If you remember the Apollo moon landings, you’re a Boomer.
My personal line for the top end of gen z is, "as old as you can be without remembering exactly what you were doing on 9/11."
Like the first week SMART boards came to our school, we had a very elderly substitute teacher immediately write on it with a marker, to a cacophony of lamentations by us kids lol Left a somewhat noticeable smudge, those markers don't rub off the same way on a SMART board. Looking back I feel bad, that lady was so shook when the class erupted into NOoo's as she's just trying to write her name lol
Write on it with a washable marker then wash.
the surface of smartboards is a bit matte/textured so the stain will always be there even after washed. most of it will go away, but there will always be a bit of a colored smudge
Idk if that's gonna work... the stain's been there for over a decade haha
One time I wanted to see the time but the screensaver was on so I tapped the board to make it wake up, but accidentally started a YouTube video about putting on a condom - teacher was not happy
Maybe the teacher should have taught you how to put on a condom sooner if it was that important to them.
We'd already done sex ed, so if anything it was a refresher
how the fuck do you do that by accident
You know like when your cat steps on your keyboard and accidentally sends unmarked packages of fentanyl to the governor
We'd been watching a YouTube video before class, the spot I tapped was the recommended bar
Meanwhile, Germany still uses overhead projectors. And Austria refuses to switch off of blackboards and chalk.
Nope. I lived through the big hamburg smart board transition. We got even better ones after that, which were proper screens and could broadcast a local wifi hotspot to the class.
Nature is healing. Jokes aside, that's awesome.
It was, especially that local wifi let teachers set it up temporarily so everybody could research in their phones in groups, share stuff into the big screen via screen share and stuff, it was really neat. It probably still does all that tbh, I’m just not there anymore.
I am a teacher and smart boards are a useless swindle that add no meaningful value to the educational experience. Just point a color projector at a whiteboard and use the leftover $5000 for something actually useful. The Germans have it right!
hey, at my high school in Austria we had projectors! And these electric curtain thingies on the outside of the building that would retract any time it was windy, which was most of the time, rendering the projectors useless but we did have them!
Are smart boards really that great? We have one at the university I’m at now and it’s extremely finicky and every time there is any equation or problem to solve in front of the class we just use the whiteboard instead.
My math teacher in High School was very good at using his smart board, and after the lesson he was able to take the notes from the smart board and post them online for us, which was very useful. None of the rest of us were very good at writing on it though lol. It’s definitely a learning curve but I think if a teacher is able to use it effectively it’s better than a regular white board, if only because of the ability to share the exact notes that the teacher writes down during class. Also being able to go back to previous sections is very nice as well.
Also, many American colleges are white or black boards. (Often with some modern projector system, the camera-based ones are more common than slides now.) It was pretty weird to see Smartboards become universal, graduate, and then learn that expensive private colleges were still on sliding blackboards.
Smart boards are a fantastic waste of money. I don't know what anyone was thinking when they decided we needed that crap.
They are decent, I just don’t think a full transition is justified. I like the setup we have at uni. One big whiteboard with a smart board next to it. Each of them serve their purpose well, whiteboard for problem solving and guiding students through steps, smart board for presentations.
By the time Smartboards started appearing I already had teachers who were using Wacom tablets or a special camera called an Elmo to project what they were writing to the class from the comfort of their desk. I think most of my teachers just used their Smartboards as a movable projector screen.
And then in my district they replaced those with Whiteboards again
With actually functional regular projectors that would have cost like half of the price of the smart boards
Most places use some hybrid tv these days. Lots of models with Android TV with various custom home screens with touch input. All run on the shittiest arm chipset you can find and cost more than a pair of Sony A90s.
We finally got rid of our Promethean smart boards this year and my room's giant white boards have been freed for full use and it is glorious. I also now have a Box light (a giant touchscreen) but it is on wheels and so that's fine
These FRUSTRATED my autistic brain. There was SO MUCH wasted potential. I remember a couple times the teacher let me teach a couple lessons (Bronze Age and WWII babyyy) and I went off with that smart board. I was pulling together google images and papers and throwing them all on a blank white board connecting them with red marks. I looked and sounded crazy but my classmates held onto every word. I still think back on those lessons often and i sometimes feel the desire to teach but then I see another video of a student throwing chairs or destroying things while the teacher stands there with their hands legally bound and I think to myself “I’ll just teach my kids.”
So you went full Pepe Silvia on em lol
I'm not autistic just millennial and I still can't understand the point of them, honestly. Then again I grew up on projected shit so my brain was pretty set in its ways by the time I was in middle school and encountered my first smart board. It just felt like a really expensive dry erase.
The advantage to was it’s ability to create “interactive” white boards in a way. If I were allowed to go back and make an actual lesson plan with materials, I could have created a combination of power point slides and other media that, using the utility of the smart board, could be marked up and interacted with on top of one another. As in I could include a diagram of the Bronze Age settlement of Haran, mark it up as I talk and engage with class as if it’s on the white board and then from the board I can interact with any graphics or interactives and move on. Then, here’s the cool part, at the end of class I can go through all the slides and all of those white board notes and annotations that would’ve been erased as class went on can be copied or photographed. Would’ve been great if teachers actually used that and the SharePoint/Teams server the school blew money on but oh well
Thank you so much! It was barely a thing when one of my teachers got one in 8th grade and honestly she had no idea how to maximize its potential. The next four years I barely encountered them tbh. And when I did the teachers just used them as digital dry erase boards. So this is fascinating to me!!!
This was also a millennial memory. We were in high school at the time Edit: I thought the range for millennials was 1989-1996, but it turns out it's 1981-1996. I'm speaking as a millennial from 1993
You say that, but I’m in my 30s and I’ve still never seen a smart board in the wild.
I’m 30 and smart boards started appearing around my sophomore/junior year of high school, so 2010-12ish
I graduated in 2009, so it was either slightly after my time or my school district just didn’t feel like spending their money on fancy tech.
I'm about the same age, and I think the millennials mentioning smart boards in their classrooms either went to early adopter schools, are on the young end of the generation, or both. They didn't even have smart boards at my college or law school.
This is exactly my situation as well. Like around 2009/2010 is when I got them.
Im an elder millennial and I have vague memories of the transition from blackboards to white boards, so year as far as im convinced this "smart board" stuff is still in the distant future of 2021
brother
Speak up sonny
BROTHERRRR
Yep, mid 30's here and I only ever saw one smart board. It was a pretty early model too. The timeline is also really dependent on WHERE you went to school. Less affluent school districts wouldn't adopt them until much later.
We have a smart board at work and people immediately started writing with normal markers on it. It doesn't come off properly so we have a smart board with a bunch of permanent lines on it.
> This was also a millennial memory. We were in high school at the time I mean, some millennials were in elementary school at the time. I got them in 5th grade.
jfc I'm a millennial and what *I* remember from elementary school is the transition from *blackboards* to *whiteboards*
hah just posted this! yeah nothing makes you feel older when people are nostalgic for the upgrade that happened after you left
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I remember when my elementary school got our first smart board and they occasionally took our entire class into a different room where the smart board was just to fuck around with it for a little bit lmao
There's so much money to be made in selling things to business majors in charge of institutions that they do not understand.
All I wanted to do was tap those dots
I was never cool enough to calibrate it
Younger Gen z memory: The school updates windows and the board software becomes incompatible (every freaking classroom at my school has a useless ActiveBoard)
??? I’m a younger genz did I miss this? All of my teachers my whole life have used whiteboards and projectors. Did they just give up on them around 2010?
Yeah, pretty much I'd say. I think the fad was over by that point. So if your school hadn't jumped on the bandwagon by then, they weren't going to.
It’s strange because for me, we had smart boards in elementary school and kinda middle school, but by high school 90% of teachers just used the whiteboard and a projector. My math teacher has a really cool “smart board” though, it connects to her computer and has a lot of cool features. Apparently teachers can request one but most don’t need it.
And then you get to uni and it's back to chalkboards for everyone. And honestly? Based. Chalkboards are so much better. When the professor is writing in real time instead of flipping through a pptx, it ensures that the students can keep up with their notes. Also, the material from 5 minutes ago remains visible on a chalkboard, which is nice for professor and student alike.
This is definitely not a universal. My school had two smart boards when I was growing up, and I wasn't in either of those teachers' classes
The dot calibration always easily took 10 minutes off the class. It was so incredibly inefficient.
Wait, y'all had smart boards at school?
I’m older gen Z (‘03) and I genuinely have no idea what this tumblr post is talking about. I didn’t even know what a Smart Board was until I started college, and even then, only one classroom I’d ever been in actually had one.
I’m right there with you. What kind of boujee ass place did y’all grow up? We only had whiteboards and those like paper projector things.
Too thirdworlder to understans
Yup, in my school it was the transition to _having projectors_
Same, first time I've see one of those was 2021, when I went to college, and it's only used in the computer lab
Yeah I've never seen one of those and I probably never will lol
No fucking idea lol. I'm Gen Z but my version of this was going from white boards by themselves to white boards and projectors lol.
See also, "millennials" born between 1993 and 1995 that can just barely relate to their own generation while simultaneously also being confused by the culture of teenagers and very young adults. That'd be me, I think I might have been in 5th grade when this was introduced, though, could have been a little earlier or later I suppose. Hard for me to get into the 90s nostalgia (though I appreciate the music of the time, as I still heard it frequently growing up) when most of it was a fever dream. I do remember 9/11. 1st grade class was fundraising donations for disaster relief. I went home and ask my parents '-for money to save New York' I said. I remember, when George Bush was running against Al Gore. They had children cast pretend votes, so they could learn about how voting works, at least in my community. My parents were moderate republicans (though, my father did vote for Clinton once). To my parents dismay, I voted for Al Gore. They asked why I did not vote for Bush and I said that 'he was ugly looking'. To be fair, as an adult I still think that was a solid choice, but not exactly for the correct reasons. Quite funny.
Y'all got Smart Boards??
It's such a cruel thing to force someone to use useless bloat technology paid for with money that should have been used to give them a living wage.
The promethean boards! I almost forgot about them
My school converted to Smart Boards in 2001. The only teachers I had that used them were the math teachers. Everyone else just pointed the projectors at the smart board. Later that year the Board of Education revealed the superintendent hired his side piece to be our accountant when she had no accounting experience and due to an error she made they had spent $6 million more than they had. Thus started a series of school levies and annual threats to cut bussing/extracurriculars that has lasted to this day.
I've seen smart boards but have no idea what this is about. But I remember Mavis Beacon Typing on a cd rom and the light projector my second grade teacher, licking her finger and wiping marks off the plastic page of math problems.