From Slates to Whiteboards: How Classroom Boards Changed

From Slates to Whiteboards

1Walk into almost any classroom today, and you will see a large board at the front of the room. Teachers use it to share lessons with the whole class. But classroom boards have not always looked the same. Over about two hundred years, they changed many times.

2In the early 1800s, paper cost a lot of money, and many families could not buy much of it. Students needed a way to practice writing and arithmetic without using up paper. The answer was a slate. A slate was a thin, flat piece of dark stone set inside a wooden frame. Students wrote on it with a slate pencil, then wiped it clean with a cloth and used it again.

3Slates had a problem of their own. Each slate was small, so a teacher could not show one lesson to the whole class at once. During the 1800s, more and more schools hung a large board on the wall. Many of these boards were made of slate or of wood painted black, so people called them blackboards. Now a teacher could write with chalk while every student watched.

4Later, in the 1900s, many schools put up green boards instead. Some people thought green was easier on the eyes than black. Teachers still wrote on these boards with chalk, so most people called them chalkboards.

5Chalk had one big drawback: dust. Each time a teacher wrote or erased, tiny bits of chalk floated into the air. As a result, the dust settled on desks, clothes, and hands. The dust could also make some people sneeze or cough. When schools began to fill with computers, many people worried that chalk dust might harm the machines.

6Near the end of the 1900s, whiteboards began to replace chalkboards in many classrooms. Whiteboards and chalkboards are alike in some ways. Both hang at the front of the room, and both can be erased and used again. However, they are different in other ways. A chalkboard is dark, and teachers write on it with chalk. A whiteboard has a smooth, shiny white surface, and teachers write on it with markers that come in many colors. Unlike chalk, the markers make no dust, but they can dry out if someone forgets to put the cap back on.

7Today, some classrooms also have digital boards that connect to a computer. Teachers can show videos on them, and students can move words and pictures with a touch. From stone slates to touch screens, classroom boards keep changing to help students learn.