teacher here. Most smartboards are rubbish. The calibration fails constantly, it's really hard to draw on it ... and most "ready made" lessons for smartboards are usually boring. So I'm afraid it's a projector for me.
The ready-made lessons are more shitty tech demos (Amazing! Drag and drop! Buttons! Computers!) to wow the administrators than actual lessons.
We have smart boards and chromebook carts in every room of my high school, and yet they canceled our fucking robotics team due to "lack of funding" and fired our oldest computer science teacher because his experience + degrees meant he cost them too much to employ [0]. Yes, I'm mad.
You’re absolutely right, it’s absolutely admins seeing the “ooh shiny” aspect of these things. I have a feeling the company pushing these boards has really good salespeople.
And I’m an officer of a robotics team, so I feel your pain. We get zero funding from the school. Most money comes from members’ pockets or fundraisers. Eventually, we want to ease the burden on members by getting corporate sponsors, since we obviously won’t get any money from the school district, who’s busy cutting library budgets and buying smart boards.
We have smart boards and chromebook carts in every room of my high school, and yet they canceled our fucking robotics team due to "lack of funding" and fired our oldest computer science teacher because his experience + degrees meant he cost them too much to employ [0]. Yes, I'm mad.
[0] https://de01903704.schoolwires.net/site/handlers/filedownloa...