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I've been tinkering with the idea of installing several glass boards in the lab & offices instead of white boards. They look cool, and seem to erase better. But I do not have extended experience using them.
What are the pros and cons of using glass boards compared to white boards in general?
When I was a grad student, I mounted a 1x2 meters glass plane in front of a white wall at my place. It was great for scribbling stuff and for large drawings. I also developed the habit of drawing on the glass doors at my previous lab, because the closest whiteboard was in another room.
The big advantage: glass is very smooth, you will never have stains accumulating like on a white board. No matter how zealous you or the cleaning staff is, white boards are a bit porous and the material deteriorates with time (UV radiations, etc.) and becomes even more porous, making it harder to clean up. For the same reasons, if you inadvertently use a permanent marker instead of a white board marker, it's easy to clean it up. Finally, existing glass structures also provide large surfaces for drawing.
The disadvantages: lighting (back lighting, shadows, etc.) can impede reading what you wrote. It helps if the glass is placed immediately in front of a white wall. Also, the cleaning staff might erase your brilliant ideas overnight because they were instructed to clean all windows.
I find actual whiteboards easier to read than plain glass due to the see-through nature of glass. Some places have glass walls that face a hallway or glass windows in their office doors that people use as writing surfaces with dry-erase markers. That can be fine, but the fact that you can see through the surface can be very distracting when writing/reading the "board".
Regular whiteboards can be hard to keep clean and should be regularly wiped with a wet cloth or paper towel, in my experience, and then dried with a clean cloth or paper towel. This seems to keep them readable and usable longer than using a dry-erase board eraser which seem to do a poor job of removing the dry-erase marker dust. This is very similar to what places with good janitorial services do with their chalkboards (i.e., wash them frequently). I don't know about the long-term issues cleaning glass which has been used with dry-erase markers, but I assume the issues of getting the marker dust off are similar. Wash them to clean them.
The whiteboards we have are easier to read than the glass boards, even though the latter have a white backing etc. Whiteboard markers do not mark in the same way. I was using both kinds of board today with the same pens. On the whiteboard, the ink is darker. The students could read both, but it was a small group in a small room. Writing on the glass board is more of a struggle than the whiteboards - not horrible, but the difference is distinctly noticeable if you are using one one moment and the other the next. The whiteboard definitely is easier/clearer.
In the newest rooms, we have glassboards on three walls. This creates a great deal more glare than whiteboards would. This can be a bit uncomfortable and colleagues of mine have mentioned getting headaches from the light. This is despite the fact that these rooms also have newer lighting systems i.e. spotlights and panels of diffuse light rather than the older strip lights.
