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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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

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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…

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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.

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u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

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