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Comment by 20years | Hacker News Reader

"What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads."

Yes this is exactly what I see in my sons school. Some of the kids actually know more than the teachers and end up providing support to the teachers. Then the kids do silly things like duplicating icons on the home screen 100+ times and change folder names to things like "poop". The teachers freak out thinking they hacked into the computers because they have no idea on how those simple things were done, or how to disable them from doing those things.

"What I’d really love to see more of is using computers to integrate math and arts together... digital arts with an emphasis on both rigorous math and rigorous art"

Yes!!!

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I attend high school in the Bay Area and I'm surrounded by this Smartboard epidemic. Nearly every classroom at our school has one, but only around 10% of teachers actually use the "smart" portion, even though most of them have gotten some basic training in their proper usage. Most are used as dumb projectors for presentations and lectures, and the pens are seldom used. And keep in mind, this is Silicon Valley, the "cradle of tech innovation."

I find this to be an egregious waste of school funds, funds that could have gone towards funding school plays, improving school facilities, or expanding the engineering course offerings. And the real kicker is that my HS is an "arts magnet" school.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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.

[0] https://de01903704.schoolwires.net/site/handlers/filedownloa...

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.

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