Daily Blog – Ross Jones – September 25, 2008: BIG SCREENS IN THE CLASSROOM

I attended my son’s back-to-school night at his high school this week, and to my surprise found a front projector set up in every one of his classrooms. Granted, these were business-type projectors, not really designed or appropriate for home theater use. But even so, I was impressed on a couple of different levels.

First, at the risk of sounding ancient, I remember copying notes that my teacher wrote with chalk on a blackboard, risking eye strain, white lung disease, and the dreaded nails-on-the-chalkboard sound at 10 kHz. So purely from an educational perspective, watching a powerpoint or graphics presentation on a big screen has to enhance the learning experience.

Second, from a home theater enthusiast perspective, it’s nice to expose our youth to the benefits of watching content (even educational content!) on a huge screen, rather than a three-inch video on computer from Youtube or on their iPod. Maybe in another five or ten years, when those high schoolers start looking at setting up their own home theaters, they’ll remember those front projectors from the classroom and think, “hey, one of those will work really well at my place.”