E-RATE funding season is here and it's made me nostalgic. As we make our way through 2015, you hear very little about digital whiteboards. They were a hot item only a few years ago, but things have changed thanks to the growing prevalence of Wi-Fi in schools and the rising popular tablets and 1:1 initiatives.
Let's step back and look at what's changed:
iPad
The iPad was released in 2010 and took hold in education over the next few years. 
As the cost for various models has dropped, it’s become more cost effective to deploy 1:1 deployments district wide. Why would you put one large board in front of the class when you can hand each student an iPad running iOS 8? The creativity options on the iPad blow anything a digital whiteboard has to offer.
With a built in camera, simple software, and a powerful OS, the iPad is everything a digital white board should have, but it’s handheld.
Cost
Digital whiteboards are not cheap. Yes, there are options for $1,000, but that doesn’t include any digital responders, projectors, installation, or site-wide software 
licensing of professional software. You’ll have thousands per classroom at a minimum. Why would you spend $4–5k per classroom on one board when you could buy a lot of iPads instead? Technology is much more effective when each student has one rather than sitting and watching others use it.
Complexity
When using something like an iPad, you can figure it out with relative ease. In contrast, the software for digital whiteboards is incredibly complex. It feels like software that was written by folks who have never worked with teachers. We have three of them in our school, and they have largely become glorified projectors with nice screens.
We had continual issues with driver updates for the new version of Mac OS X. When the software wants to 
update, it requires a large software download and manual installation. Does that sound like something built for teachers?
It didn't always used to be like this. When I came to the education world in 2009, I quickly noticed digital whiteboards were a hot trend. They were selling in droves. They were taking the original school technology (the blackboard) and trying to “digitize” it. Instead of writing with chalk or markers, we were plugging up laptops to a board and using “digital” pens.
The vendors offered prebuilt lesson templates and ways to share content. It seemed like it was poised to be next big thing in education. What was driving the excitement behind this technology and was it warranted? There was really two things driving adoption:
1. Economic stimulus money
Check out this quote from an article I found from 2012: But other analysts say a more radical reinvention will be needed. Otherwise, they say, the market for whiteboards may have peaked. They point domestically to the extinction of a steady funding stream to drive purchases, including the end of the infusion of money from the federal economic-stimulus program. There are parallels across the globe and even in Britain, where Becta, the nation's educational technology agency, died amid budget cuts in 2011, though it's too early to tell the exact extent of the effect on the whiteboard market.
These were the hot item, and schools that deployed them were seen as “technology savvy”. These boards were paid for through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and, schools were able to outfit classrooms for little money out of their operating budgets.
2. Research report from Marzano Research Labs
Here is the entire report if you want to read it, but I can summarize it up by saying it was a glowing review. Never mind the fact that the report was commissioned by one of the digital whiteboard manufacturers, though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . You can read some feedback on that report here. With a “favorable” research report and readily available federal funding, the market for digital whiteboards was booming. Districts were outfitting entire classrooms with them. It was time to really innovate with technology and teaching.
What can we learn from the rise and fall of digital whiteboards? Lots!
Come back next week to learn how we can avoid the sins of our fathers and build technology that is teacher friendly.
With a new generation of E-RATE funding coming forth, it’s important that we make wise investments in technology that will be impactful for the long term.