Another Blackboard Bites The Dust
The days of the classroom blackboard are disappearing into chalk dust.
One by one these silent sentinels to generations of students are departing classrooms across NSW, condemned to a life of decorative display in restaurants and pubs. Noisy, flashy interlopers, better known as interactive white boards, are replacing them.
Yesterday, the last of the blackboards at Haberfield Public School in inner-western Sydney was removed.
The school principal, Karlynne Jacobsen, who attended the school as a girl, watched as the interactive whiteboards were installed with joint funding by the Parents and Citizens Association and the Department of Education and Training.
Computer and multimedia images are projected onto a whiteboard using a digital projector and computer.
The projector displays the image from the computer onto the screen. It is controlled by touching the board, either with a finger or pen.
“[When I was a student] this was a demonstration school where teachers received their training,” Ms Jacobsen said, “and coloured drawings on the blackboard were just amazing for us at the time.”
“Now we can show inner-city children - who may never have seen a wild animal before - not just a photograph or illustration, but living and breathing animals, eating and running, all in the classroom setting.
“To see their eyes light up is amazing. They are overawed, and - sometimes - so are we.”
The company Charles Tims has been making blackboards for 100 years and has had to adjust to the changes taking place in classrooms.
From a Melbourne garage, the company grew to operate Australia-wide and was taken over by CSR this year.
Since the mid-1980s, what was once a stable line of making and selling blackboards evolved into making whiteboards and selling the interactive boards, too.
The company’s general manager, Greg McConnell, said blackboard sales were now confined to a boutique market; schools were no longer interested. He said static whiteboards were the mainstay of classrooms, complemented by the technology-driven interactive boards and other computer equipment.
Asked about the longevity of the interactive board, he replied with the air of a man whose 100-year-old company had seen off many Johnny-come-latelys.
”With any electronic product there is a constant state of evolution,” Mr McConnell said. ”Equipment can quickly be seen as no longer being the bee’s knees,” he said.
”The plain, static boards will stay around much longer - we guarantee our whiteboards for 25 years.”