Interactive Whiteboard Worries

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 4/1/2005

It sounds like a student's dream excuse come true: staring at the classroom board may cause eye damage. But it's a claim that has been circulating among educators in the United Kingdom for the past few years. The concern? That staring too long at interactive whiteboards, or directly into the projector that accompanies them, can cause peripheral retina damage to the eye.

But there seems to be little concern in the United States. And at least one U. S. health organization, the American Optometric Association (AOA) (www.aoanet.org), has never heard of the problem and actually doubts that the device could cause permanent eye damage. "If you were staring directly at the projector, it would cause short-term consequences like an afterimage," says Dr. Jeffrey L. Weaver, AOA's director of clinical care. "I have not heard any reports on these, however."

Still, SMART Technologies (www.smarttech.com), one of the leading manufacturers of interactive whiteboards, has taken a proactive approach and included safety guidelines in its whiteboard manual. It reads: "Instruct children not to look in the direction of, or stare at, the beam of light created by the projector."

Eye damage from light sources is not unknown. Snow blindness, a sometimes permanent injury to the cornea, can result from sunlight reflected off large areas of snow. And staring too long at a solar eclipse can cause retinal damage. But the sun is quite different than a teaching tool, says Weaver. "A projector just doesn't have any type of luminescence close to the sun or an eclipse," he explains.