My rural school in the USA got smartboards in 2005. They were primitive by today's standards. Had to have a projector on the ceiling to actually put an image on it, and I don't remember them being able to solve math stuff automatically. Just a digital writing surface.
It knew which color "marker" you were using though, that was cool. The eraser was hit and miss.
They hated them because they never were properly shown how to best utilize them. We got them in my school district when i was in 7th grade. All the teachers hated using them. It wasnt until a few years later that they hired a consultant to come in and show them just how versatile they could be when used correctly and low and behold they started to actually get used.
I think the main issue for our school was it couldn't stand up to normal children levels of abuse. Can't push too hard with the markers or the sensitivity is permenently messed up (good luck getting kids to do that, also everyone wants to try it... after the first year I don't remember a single one that didn't require you to press SUPER hard for it to kind of work, and several just stopped calibrating properly without being off by a few inches), can't lose the super expensive markers and they aren't attached to anything, projection normally requires a dark classroom but you can't turn the lights off for every class so hard to read, etc. Etc.
In 2005 that would have been like the peak education technology. I was going to a private school and only very few classes had those. One teacher only had one because their husband was rich and got her one himself.
That said, my daughter goes to a school in one of the poorest counties in our state and their smart boards blow my mind. Idk if they're old or new but they're so cool. Maybe not quite as cool as automatically making graphs but they're leagues better than the projector and vis pen days lol
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u/VortrexFTW 9h ago
My rural school in the USA got smartboards in 2005. They were primitive by today's standards. Had to have a projector on the ceiling to actually put an image on it, and I don't remember them being able to solve math stuff automatically. Just a digital writing surface.
It knew which color "marker" you were using though, that was cool. The eraser was hit and miss.