Smartboard

With a handful of notable exceptions, most urban classrooms in the United States operate just as they did a century ago: a chalkboard where a smartboard should be, a nicked desk instead of a multifunction workstation, and rows of students segregated in their schools and neighborhoods by class and race.

Smartboards sound like a great idea until you work out how much time and money they tie up. The boards themselves cost thousands of dollars and they must be linked to a computer and an LCD projector.

Smartboards make slides easier to display and manipulate, but teachers have been showing pictures to students for centuries.