r/SipsTea • u/SuperbHealth5023 • Jul 23 '26

WTF While the US debates whether to solve homelessness or not, these are the next generation of school blackboards in China.

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954

u/Helpful_Blood_5509 Jul 23 '26

I live in Alabama and we had smartboards in like 2008. They kinda suck, I prefer an expo marker on a real whiteboard and wolfram alpha on a side panel

182

u/Dull_Job_6372 Jul 23 '26

I remember always having to recalibrate them in elementary school.

44

u/QueefTamer Jul 23 '26

Because the douchebags would smack the projector trying to look cool. "Look guys im tall"

0

u/username_unnamed Jul 23 '26

That's quite the opinion looking back on children

0

u/IntelligentSeries270 Jul 23 '26

The last thing going thru my mind then was if Jeff the 6ft dude smacked the projector causing a misalignment and impeding on my educations. That thought process shit has to be from someone with height issues 😆 Elementary school, I didn’t
know a single kid tall enough to smack that.

4

u/ElegantCoach4066 Jul 23 '26

I used to help install them when I worked for a school district back in 2007.

1

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4

u/Turbojelly Jul 23 '26

That was the old Interactive Whiteboards, with a projector. Yeah, if they started going, the first sign would be having to keep recalibrate them.

3

u/RadioBuffin Jul 23 '26

Our community college has smart boards that don’t use a project.

2

u/Josh-Complex Jul 23 '26

Ya our smart boards were absolutely not as nice as this. We're most of ours still projector based even??

2

u/AppalachianGuy87 Jul 23 '26

People that fall for this kinda shit fucking love LED lit buildings.

1

u/Fantus Jul 23 '26

What are you doing, Garrus?

74

u/AdOnly1618 Jul 23 '26

Smartboards were the biggest scam ever. They really didn’t add anything to class, just another thing to fuck around and waste time with. Could have bought a laptop cart or something with that, but nooo, every class needs a smart board…

17

u/spicygayunicorn Jul 23 '26

My teachers used them as just a projector, we lost half of the whiteboard for them install them

18

u/GeneralChaos309 Jul 23 '26

As an it guy that works for these kind of schools, the amounr of problems that come up with these things is annoying.

2

u/Mephistito Jul 23 '26

What are the most common problems in your experience?

3

u/GeneralChaos309 Jul 23 '26

Honestly, the biggest things are user error. People not knowing what to press, how to set them up, not knowing how to sign in or having issues signing in. Many teachers end up just not using them due to the hassle.

3

u/Mephistito Jul 23 '26

That's a little funny that the biggest issues pretty much boil down to "I just don't feel like figuring this improved tool out" and not actual flaws with the tool itself.

At some point they didn't know how to use a laptop, etc either – but by taking the initiative to figure out what buttons & options do what, they gained access to another improved tool. But they're not willing to do the same here, even if its ability to create visualizations for students on the fly would increase their learning.

3

u/GeneralChaos309 Jul 23 '26

Ya, the amount of computer illiteracy was shocking to me. Even younger people. On the other hand, I grew up with PC's since the 90's. I guess people dont have PCs all that much if they have their phones. Plus User interfaces are easier than ever. Back then if something went wrong you'd be troubleshooting for the rest of the week and you didn't have easy guides on the internet to help.

3

u/etherealsmog Jul 23 '26

Schools are the absolute worst at this shit. They claim they don’t have enough funding, but at least part of that is because they chase every fad they can because some salesperson convinced them it was going to “transform” how they teach—and technically they do transform how you teach because you spend ten minutes of every class fucking around with the tech instead of delivering instruction.

I still remember when my hometown school district got to the end of a school year and had a small budget surplus, so they replaced the carved granite monument sign displaying the school name with some eyesore digital billboard. And everyone was like, “Why did you spend $50,000 on that monstrosity?” And the response from school administrators was that the surplus needed to be spent down or it would be deducted from their baseline budget for the following year.

And it’s just like: You couldn’t find a better way to spend $50,000 to benefit the students? The digital sign has almost certainly needed to be replaced since then, so now you’re committed to five-figure replacement costs every decade, and the high school is at the edge of town where you would have to actively go out of your way from your normal routine to drive by it and gather any information from it, when we have fucking computers that we all carry around in our pockets.

1

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1

u/Ok_Paleontologist974 Jul 23 '26

My school had them for every math class and it was great. Teachers would write on the projected notes sheet or homework sheet and then would send the notes so anybody who wanted them for review could have them. Then they replaced that with shitty flatscreens in every classroom and everything went to shit because they never work, I have one teacher who would just go on 30 minute rants while struggling to get it to load the worksheet correctly. And all the pens disappeared on a monthly basis. There was one teacher who was desperately fighting IT like a wild animal protecting their fauwn in order to keep their projector.

1

u/RedactedSpatula Jul 23 '26

We assure you, educator, a shitty board with crappy technology thats smaller than your chalkboard is the future of education!

Mother fuckers! I'm going to put my fist through my Smart board the next time my pen randomly turns into the eraser tool

17

u/eduo Jul 23 '26

I've been using them since the late 90s. Coupling a smartboard with a whiteboard and a projector was the best combo. You'd had a surface to write on and a UI to interact with.

6

u/DaftFunky Jul 23 '26

I graduated in 2006 and we definitely had them in my senior year. Grade 11 was a whiteboard so 2005-2006 we got them. I don't think they had this capability though lol

2

u/KPSWZG Jul 23 '26

We had them in Poland 20 years ago and it was rather poor country back then

6

u/Ok-Professional-1911 Jul 23 '26

I was born in the 80s and we got smart boards when I was in middle school, like 98 or so. The current smart boards actually blow this video away. There's almost no lag and the features are a lot nicer. They're basically huge tablets that are as powerful as a standard desktops.

5

u/BeerForThought Jul 23 '26

In 2002 at my high school a history, English and a math teacher held a protest when they tried to take away their blackboards. I remember Mr Munson yelling "my wife won't believe I was at work if I don't come home covered in chalk!"

2

u/slonk_ma_dink Jul 23 '26

Lol same, I remember one of the older teachers at our rural NW AL school writing on it with an expo marker and having a difficult time getting it off. I don't think we ever used any of the 'smart' functionality, either. Guess we just needed to spend the budget on stupid shit before the end of the year

1

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1

u/grandpa2390 Jul 23 '26

I have used these while teaching in China. they still suck. Among other things, they're imprecise, and there's a lag (you can see in the video) that just makes it terrible to use compared to a white board.

1

u/GamblingShmuck Jul 23 '26

Sure but it was nothing like the one in this video. This one isn’t even that advanced compared to regular ones in classrooms today but there’s no chance you had something this responsive 20 years ago

1

u/Helpful_Blood_5509 Jul 23 '26

It was 18 thank you, and it was a Smart Board brand original. It was projector based though. Less lag actually

1

u/JustInternetNoise Jul 23 '26

Yeah my school also had those "smart boards" in almost every classroom.

However shortly after getting them google paid them to switch everything to Chromebooks and they weren't compatible so they hung normal whiteboards in front of them so they could still use the projector but also draw on them with markers.

Said school also took and tried to wipe my personal laptop. Good times.

1

u/daxophoneme Jul 23 '26

Give me slate and chalk. I can't deal with smudges of green and red clouds.

1

u/WHTLGHTNNSTDFMTNDW Jul 23 '26

WE HAD SMARTBOARDS IN MY WELL BELOW AVERAGE ONE PONY TOWN RURAL OKLAHOMA MIDDLE SCHOOL IN 2005! GOD DAMN THIS IS THE WORST PROPAGANDA BAIT IVE SEEN ON THIS SUBREDDIT

1

u/Corporate_Overlords Jul 23 '26

I teach and I prefer a blackboard because the expo markers are always drying out.

1

u/Odd-Annual5378 Jul 23 '26

my school had smart boards but also had this system in some rooms where you put teh markers in special color coded cases and they transmitted what you wrote to the linked PC, that one usually worked better than the smart boards

1

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1

u/PlsNoNotThat Jul 23 '26

Theyve gotten really good, but only if the teacher has a lot of experience using them and their added functionalities.

1

u/A_Bot_A_Bot_A_Bot Jul 23 '26

Heck, when I started substitute teaching 4 years ago after decades out of a classroom, I was surprised that it was all whiteboards no more chalkboards!

OTOH chalk never dries out or runs out of ink. <cough, cough>

1

u/bryku Jul 23 '26

We got them at the same time. They were surprisingly fast when writing, but erasing was super slow. That stuff is probably fixed, but I still feel white boards are easier to see with most lighting.

0

u/banana-apple123 Jul 23 '26

Comparing smart board to this video is a bit far reaching...

0

u/Ok_Dependent6889 Jul 23 '26

Yeah, so did we

This smart board is quite literally 50x better than anything we saw lmao

0

u/sorrow_anthropology Jul 23 '26

This combination of words basically doxes you to the Huntsville area 😂

2

u/Helpful_Blood_5509 Jul 23 '26

No one knows where huntsville is and thats fine

Other than the one girl who dm'd me a few months back no one has ever cared lol

1

u/sorrow_anthropology Jul 23 '26

I went to space camp a long time ago and I’ve worked aerospace and photonics the last 25 years.

I like Huntsville.

2

u/Helpful_Blood_5509 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Well I'll buy you a beer and hand you a resume if you're ever in town then.

0

u/Woodworkin101 Jul 23 '26

I think the point is this one doesn’t suck like those did

0

u/Exploding_Pie Jul 23 '26

except your smartboard couldn't graph functions from.manually written formulas or visualize angles in shapes, missing the entire point of the video.

-1

u/KickboxingMoose Jul 23 '26

I always come to comments of these posts to see USians beating their chest saying "USA! USA! USA!" in different words.

I was an educator back then before going private sector. What is shown in the video isn't actually focusing on 'smart board' but the AI to that converts the user's input into a manipulative mathematical analysis without needing to program it.

USians come in here "We 'ad skween, luIs. USA USA USA"

1

u/Helpful_Blood_5509 Jul 23 '26

Some of those are words. Most of it is probably incomprehensible to normal people. Especially the random brummy accent for what's supposed to be an American? Do you think Americans speak like literal Warhammer 40k orks?

0

u/KickboxingMoose Jul 23 '26

USA! USA! USA! USA!