Our county got smartboards in every school, and, the thing is, about a third of the teachers can actually use them effectively.

And they cost 6000 dollars to lease. And our county is short on money anyways, so all in all people aren't really too happy about them...

But at least it's a step towards progress.

Smart boards seem like many lazy school boards' way of saying, "Here, now we can say we're up to speed in terms of technology." My high school did the same thing, and they were never used, but always brought up in school presentations.

Investing that money into getting an excellent technology administrator or computer science teacher would have made much more of a difference.

I think he means Blackboard, Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.

They have probably the worst UX I've seen in a web-app; their discussion board software I've had to use for a few classes- and it's abysmally pathetic. phpBB beats it by light-years. But apparently they have a monopoly thanks to some dubious patents.

No, I think he's referring to digital whiteboards that capture what is written on them.

They've been around for a while (I remember seeing them at Tech/Edu conferences in the web 1.0 days).

Jason's referring to the web software.

Pie is referring to the digital boards on walls.

I think "he" may have been referring to two different people

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree then, unless jasonlbaptiste would like to weigh in and clarify? :-)

I meant these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promethean_Ltd

At MIT we still use chalkboards. They seem to work pretty well, even with new curriculum.

I've seen the MIT OCW courses, and yeah, professors seem to be pretty efficient with them.

It's not really a step towards progress, it's administrators trying to make it look like they're making progress without actually having to do anything other than spend money.

My aunt teaches at a school where they accidentally threw away all the power cables for the smart boards before they were even used.

Can't you make a smartboard with a laptop, projector and wiimote ... http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/

Then you might want specific software but I'm sure it's available - tablet-PC software should probably do it.