Just curious: when was the last time anybody used a blackboard in school? My kids are approaching 30, and I’m pretty sure they’ve never been in a classroom with them.
Hell, for all I know they’re using holograms there days.
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Comics I Don't Understand 
I used blackboards from elementary school to high school. Some old classrooms in my college have a blackboard in it, and I graduated in 2012.
They’re still standard equipment in French schools. A plant manufacturing the chalk (Omyacolor, in Saint-Germain-la-Ville, next to Châlons-en-Champagne) still exists. I used to drive past it often when I lived in Champagne, 8 years ago. You can buy their products in the UK as well: https://www.teacherboards.co.uk/dust-free-omya-chalk and even on Amazon.
I haven’t seen chalkboards for use in classrooms for at least two decades, and I feel awful about it. In my experiences, the amount of plastic wasted by teachers through board pen use is astronomical.
I’m unaware of the environmental impact of chalk, but my guess is a lot less than the rubbish bins full of single-use pens each school produces year in and year out.
I teach at a community college and still use a chalkboard.
I remember in the late 80s I went to see a lecture by Jeremy Rifkin on campus, and he was totally flummoxed by the advanced technology our lecture hall chalkboards had, ie: a series of three sliding black boards, so when you filled one, you just slid it out of the way to reveal another completely empty one, so you wouldn’t have to erase in the middle of your lecture (this room may have had electronically sliding black boards, so you push a button to have them move, I can’t quite recall). Not only was this guy who basically does nothing more than go around giving lectures totally unable to even begin to fathom this system, he then angrily turned to the audience to demand someone produce an eraser or something, and ended up ineffectually wiping a handkerchief across the board he had filled. Dude, prepare, know your room, and don’t chide the audience for your lack of preparation and stupidity. This practical level of know-nothingness sort of encapsulated the problem with his whole presentation to me — I could argue the flaws in his thinking and lack of knowledge on the more abstract topics he’s always on about, but why bother, when the dude can’t even use a chalkboard, and berates the wrong people to address his problems…
I went on a college tour to Cornell in 2016.There were blackboards all over the place. They claimed they were in use.
If you’re not up to date on classroom presentation technology, you might be surprised by how widespread the Smart Board type of system has penetrated. (That’s probably a brand name, but I mean it generically.) It’s not holograms yet, but does use a computer, a projector, and a whiteboard surface which has sensors for special styluses. On some, you can optionally use actual dry-erase markers, but the paradigm use is with the “marker” not actually marking right on the board, but the sensors directing the computer to direct the projector to draw where you were “marking”. Also for controlling the computer, just like a scaled-up touch screen.
Back in a previous century, when I was a grad student in Computer Science and was about to do a quarter teaching a class, our cohort, along with the Math grad students similarly situated, were given some good trainings. A favorite professor from Math did a session on teaching with white marker board classrooms. (This was not the Smart Boards I just mentioned, but old style literal marking. )
Besides considerations of what you write down and what you just say, and what to expect the students to provide, there was some practical consideration of how to manage the white board assemblies with sliding overlapping units,like what larK mentions.
As Diane taught us, with some planning it could be quite systematic. You might have some definitions and notations you want to keep visible the whole time. Those go on a front slider, probably in first left place. Other than that, start your proof or whatever on the BACK slider of a first area, when filled slide it up and the FRONT slider down, for panel 2. When that is filled, either move on to the right, or if you must stay where you are, raise front slider to hide back slider, and write panel 3 on the FIXED BACK board. So you will have panels 2 and 3 showing, and will need to pull down 2 if you need to refer back to the 1 on the back slider. OR if the physical interlock allows it, you could leave 2 visible on top and pull down 1 to show at bottom, hiding 3.
German schools still use blackboards, although they are usually green (so I prefer to call them “chalkboards”). At our local elementary school, a few isolated classrooms have “whiteboards”, but I they are rare exceptions here. I have no idea whether they are more prevalent elsewhere in Berlin.
P.S. Olivier – I’ve seen mini-documentaries showing both the production of chalk and chalkboards in German TV.
P.P.S. The boards manufactured in that documentary were of the sliding type that larK and Mitch4 mentioned, albeit with just two panels, rather than three. The professors I had (in the early 80s) were already masterful in the use (and abuse) of multiple panel boards. I particularly remember on insidious lecturer who proceded to fill up the front board, but when he flipped that board up (and out of the way), it turned out that he had already filled the other two “hidden” boards with the notes for the rest of the lecture. Bastard. This was before they had started photographing the boards at the end of the lecture (and of course none of us had cameras back then), so we were reduced to transcribing everything as fast as we could, while still trying to listen to what he was saying.
Stan, I agree about the amount of plastic waste. Some places do have recycling, so I started collecting at my work, but we all know reduce is better than recycle. Chalk, on the other hand, gets onto and into everything. (Think black pants and electronics.)
@Chemgal: in prep school, we wrote a swear word (backward) in chalk on the window ledge where our math teacher, in black pants, used to seat; there was a lot of giggling but it soon got smudged as he sat down again and again. We also once greased the blackboard but that wasn’t such a good idea: since the teacher couldn’t write anything, he dictated the lesson (all four hours of it!).
Sliding blackboards were not a new concept in the 1980s. Here is one of the Feynman Lectures from 1964.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman%27s_Lost_Lecture
Very few of my classes in college took place in lecture halls big enough to bother with sliding boards.
Powers, I think you may be overestimating the size of the crowd needed to have them. Not just in that last-century reminiscence I posted, but in current encounters too (say 2012), I have participated in classrooms (not just auditoriums) seating around 30 to 50 when full, built with two or three areas of white marker-board with sliding panels.
jajizi: I was being sarcastic about our late 80’s blackboards utilizing “advanced technology”…
@ jaijizi – Well, that certainly awoke the “Ghosts of Lectures Past”. Feynmann was not the culprit (I was lucky to be just young enough not to have to endure him as professor*), but the scene of the crime (mentioned @10 above) was very possibly the same room as shown in that photo (I’m not sure whether the boards in our lecture hall were stacked two or three high).
P.S. (*) – Yes, Feynmann was a brilliant, Nobel-Prize-winning genius, but that is not always the best thing for teaching freshman physics. David Goodstein (mentioned as editor of that “Lost Lecture”) was in admirable contrast a much better teacher, and able to reach down to students who may not have had the brilliant intuition needed to follow Feynmann.
My experience with professors and sliding boards is that they would fill up one board and slide it up, and then proceed to use the bottom board for the rest of the lecture, even if they had to continually erase what was on it to make more room. Once the first board went up, it never came back down. Of course, pulling to top board down would have immediately covered up the bottom board, so I don’t know if that would have been better or not.
I teach at Colorado State University. One of my larger Computer Sciences courses meets in the chemistry building, where the lecture hall has several large blackboards (actually green): https://col.st/RSTtS
I don’t think my chalkboards have ever been black, mostly green. Maybe some of my college boards started black wayback when, but hard to tell this century
Jack, so in your picture the layers slide horizontally? I guess I’ve more often seen vertical. There are probably contrasting advantages to either system.
@ Mitch4 – In the mini-documentary that I mentioned above (#9), one factor in constructing the vertical sliding board system was that each board had to be weighed and then matched to a set of counterweights, so that the overall system was nearly perfectly balanced. The horizontal system is probably simpler to build, but it must depend on a good set of rollers and/or bearings to allow the boards to move easily. (Chalkboards are a lot heavier than you might otherwise think.)
chemgal: chalk gets into everything, but so does whiteboard ink, and the latter’s a lot less pleasant.
My university (early 2000’s) had some rooms with white boards, but not a huge number of them. We always in the same room when we had the prof who couldn’t handle chalk, because it was both big enough for an entire class and had white boards. The rest of my education was mostly chalk boards (although I think that the science and computer classrooms had whiteboards in high school, for obvious reasons.)
However, I’m assuming you’re more interested in elementary school. My eight-year-old says she’s had a classroom with chalkboards, but it had both, and the whiteboards were used more often. (
@Mitch4 – Holy smokes, they DO slide horizontally! There are three layers, and the front two layers slide back & forth.
I had to check—I tend to teach from my chair, using the computer screen, and so don’t tend to use chalkboards or whiteboards.
We used black boards with chalks from Kindergarten to 6th grade, but we did have white boards with pens from 7th grade to 9th grade. I guess that both were used, when I was in High School.