When I was at school, some of the teachers still used blackboards. Some of them had whiteboards, too. At university they had whiteboards, blackboards, and sometimes they used video projectors and laptops and Powerpoint presentations. Clearly technology is advancing.
Some genius has decided that the way forward is clearly, to fuse whiteboards and laptops. By their powers combined, they are...
ELECTRONIC WHITEBOARD.
And they suck.
You have a laptop. You have a projector. You have a fancy touch sensitive screen. You project the display from the laptop on to the screen. You have a "pen" that you point at the screen with, which acts like a mouse. Basically you are controlling your computer through a big touch sensitive screen.
So what sucks?
- Writing on the screen with the pen is, literally, like writing stuff in MS Paint. It comes out all scrawly. Your writing, no matter how bad it is to begin with, will look worse.
- Text recognition is pretty rubbish. If you write in nice neat un-joined-up letters, then it might just pick out what you're trying to say. If you write in joined up writing and try to get it recognised, as you may well want to, in order to avoid the scrawly mess mentioned in point 1, then you can forget it. My brief test involved my pretending to write a biology test on the board about cells. The statement "1) Where is the DNA stored" became "Dithers the data spore". Close. Oh, and you can forget about writing any numbers besides 4 and 8, it just won't recognise them.
- Teachers will, inevitably, draw on them with whiteboard markers. Then try to rub it off. With hilarious black smudgy consequences. Ooops.
- The pointy pen things break. One of them broke while being demonstrated by the guy from the company. Brilliant.
The biggest problem, however, is simply that it's all a big fat waste of time. I simply don't believe that students will learn any more for seeing stuff written out on a fancy pretend whiteboard than they would have done if it were being done on a good old fashioned blackboard. Mind you, I don't really see how having oodles of computers for the kids to use aids learning, and I'm working to support this, so maybe I'm a bit of a hypocrite.
Bring back blackboards. And the dunce hat. And caning. Oooh, in my day... uphill both ways etc etc.
I'm going home.
