Speaking of chalkboards, next time you have to give a presentation, bring a chalkboard and do your slides in realtime. Something about the visual show, auditory overload, and not least the novelty of the act makes it much more impactful and memorial than "another powerpoint that puts you to sleep"

White boards are... ok... better than powerpoint but still fail to sell it like a chalkboard does. I think it is the noise.

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bluenose69 7 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, the noise (which I'd call "the sound") is a big factor.

I teach in a classroom that had blackboard that had stood the test of time for decades. When it was replaced with a whiteboard, things went downhill. The markers dry out quickly, without much notice, so that students often have trouble reading the material. And the whiteboards get harder to erase year after year.

I guess the advantage of whiteboards is that a variety of colours can be used. But some students have deficiencies of colour recognition, so that's not really helpful. (I never used coloured chalk, for the same reason. Maximal contrast is the key.)

And the noise. That click drag click of chalk. Students after the transition to whiteboards told me that they really missed that. It enlivened the lectures. And when students were writing down notes, they knew to look up when they heard the sound.

Back to the point about the "visual show" and doing slides in real time. Yes, yes, yes. Once in a while I need to show something on the projector. The moment I turn it one, I see students start to disengage.

	▲	LorenPechtel 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely on the people with color issues. I have some red-green issues, for most purposes it makes me horrible at choosing colors and horrible at choices involving subtle colors (picking the good produce) but rarely interferes otherwise. But a thin line of color is another matter. I generally can't tell the difference between a 1-pixel wide line of FF0000 vs 00FF00. Nor can I tell the difference of a few-pixel-wide indicator. I can't crimp Ethernet because the fine line of the coloring of the wires reduces it to not much better than a guess. And a whiteboard from across the room is likely to be thin enough lines to give me big problems.