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We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don't find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as com
by killjoywashere 3y ago
We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don't find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as compelling. I actually make some use of the Jamboard app in meetings occasionally, but usually I'm at a desk with my feet up, using a tablet to draw while everyone else is remote. Not only has Jamboard never been a first-class citizen, no whiteboard is a first-class citizen in VTC world. Partially, no one else knows how to use whatever is in use today.
I actually have a slate chalkboard my dad got from an old schoolhouse in Nebraska. He built a frame for it, gave it me when my kids were young, and I have moved with that all over the world. I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do that.
I love chalkboards so much, I really, really miss them.
If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards.
- turnsout 3y agoYes! Not to mention, chalk is a simple nontoxic product made from abundant natural resources, while dry erase markers are plastic waste. It's so unnecessary.
- shortrounddev2 3y agoI worked in offices that had whiteboards and I never found anybody used them
- samtheprogram 3y agoWorkplace culture? When we were in the office, whiteboards were used at least weekly. A bit different now with remote-first or hybrid... If one person isn't in the office, it's basically dead in the water.
- shortrounddev2 3y agoProbably different fields. My company made enterprise CMS software so not much of what we did really required modeling.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoPerhaps you didn't really need them. The team I worked in used them a lot but that is because we had two week intense brainstorming workshops several times a year. We would sometimes have half a dozen of us drawing and writing on a huge whiteboard at the same time, all the while arguing about what was the best way to solve this particular problem. This was in a combined electrical engineer/software developer/physicist team. Without the whiteboard we would have been sketching on paper and would have been buried in waste paper within the hour.
- crazygringo 3y agoThe problem with chalkboards in a meeting, assuming you've set up a dedicated camera for it, is that remote participants can't draw on it. When I worked at a place with Jamboards, it was actually super useful doing meetings with virtual post-it notes that remote participants could move around. And it meant the meeting's facilitator could be remote as well.
- rmorey 3y ago> If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards. You gotta be sure to get the super special chalk mathematicians are hoarding, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8
- hotnfresh 3y agoI like the way (good) chalkboards look but touching chalk sets my teeth on edge.
- red_trumpet 3y agoYou mean because of the squeaking sound that sometimes happens? Break the chalk in half to get rid of the resonance!
- hotnfresh 3y agoNah, dusty and gross-feeling and dries out my hands.
- crazygringo 3y agoYup I'm the same. I'm horrified at how my skin feels covered in chalk dust. Chalk feels like it made sense in a time back when people didn't bathe daily and didn't know about deodorant. When the words "skin care" were decades away from being uttered for the first time. The fact that chalk is white-colored doesn't make it any less dirty or filthy. It doesn't feel like it belongs in the twenty-first century, not in civilized places like lecture halls or meeting rooms. (Chalking up before sweaty rock climbing, of course, is a totally different story.)
- hot_gril 3y agoCollege was where I learned how underrated chalkboards are; every lecture hall had them, and this wasn't long ago. No smell, no toxicity, quick erasing, reliable writing mechanism, precise writing.
- pcl 3y ago> I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do that. You should check out Huddly Canvas -- it's a USB whiteboard camera designed for just this use case. https://www.huddly.com/conference-cameras/canvas/ https://www.huddly.com/conference-cameras/canvas/
- dicriseg 3y agoThat looks great but it needs to not cost $1300. Seems like their use case is conference rooms but I’d love for remote folks with their own whiteboards to have this.