Ardor Erase Dry

I like whiteboards quite a bit.

Let me restate that in Yoda-speak for artificial emphasis: whiteboards like I a lot lot.

I like their open, friendly looks a lot lot on classroom walls, how they border and organize the room. Their size, their oddly pleasing elongated shape, the sheen as the morning sun angles off their pearlescent surface. I like the brown cork tack-strip on the top of the board for poster presentations and the metal marker tray below. Sure, the markers on those trays are usually uncapped and dry but the prepared instructor brings his or her own markers -- just buy the dry erase kind. Permanent markers are really hard to get off -- a lot lot.

Some traditionalists dream of grade school blackboards, or greenboards, or grey boards or another color-never-found-in-nature boards, but I never warmed up to them. Their cold dark surfaces create gaps on classroom walls: blackholes of classroom disappointment. Not only that, but blackboards are messy and hard to read. Erasing them leave a residue that lasts practically the entire semester. Unlike the smooth arc of a chisel-head dry-erase, chalk makes an uneven, irregular line that flakes off, usually on your pants. You don't want to lean against a blackboard. And, don't even think about letting your untrimmed fingernails strike chalk board surface. Ewww.

I have never really warmed up to the Smartboards either. Nice techy try, but they are way too expensive and too small to be useful. My neighbor's Big Screen TV is larger than most classroom Smartboards. Write a just couple of lines and you have to move to the next virtual page. In comparison, writing on a whiteboard can go on, and on, and on, circling the room in ideas. Inspiration until the class files out. In contrast, the image on the Smartboard ends when the room times out.

Another problem with Smartboard is the photo marker is often off center so the writing suffers from a geographic lag. The ceiling projector image looks nice on the Smartboard, but a 1920s pull-down projector screen works just as well, and is larger and cheaper. OK yes, the touch screen feature is magical, so long as the center mark is, again, aligned. And, Smartboard graphics are nice though primitive, no better than those in found Microsoft Word. Need to advance the PowerPoint slide? Don't tap Morse Code on the board, use the laser pointer. You should unplug yourself from the front and move around the classroom anyway.

So box up the blackboards, stash the Smartboards, and spend the material budget on circling the school (classrooms, meeting rooms, hallways, cubicles, and coffee shop walls) with whiteboards. Better yet, follow the lead of the ultra-tech note-taking app company, Evernote, which painted almost every surface of their California headquarters with ideaPaint that accepts and encourages dry-erase marker inspiration. I vote for that: floor to ceiling whiteboards. Throw in a couple of pull-down screens, invent a wireless, all-in-one mobile smart-station that doesn't lumber about like a 19th-century Victorian sideboard and one happy puppy am I a lot lot.