Reflections

For my final blog post as an ITRT, I thought a look back at the changes I’ve seen in educational technology might be appropriate.  Let me begin by saying that when my sister first described a microwave oven to me, I thought someone must have been pulling her leg, for what she described didn’t sound at all plausible.--that's how old I am (to borrow a line from David McCaleb.).  In fact, I typed a fifty page Master's thesis on a manual typewriter.

While working on my initial teacher certification,I don’t recall taking any courses in educational technology.  I don’t really remember having any training in how to thread a 16 millimeter projector, replace a bulb in an overhead projector, or how to make a correction on a ditto master with a razor blade.  These were all skills that were pretty easy to acquire, even if I never did figure out how to deal with those ditto sheets without ruining my shirts by somehow smearing purple ink on them.

The overhead projector was the basic piece of technology that distinguished a late 20th century teachers from ones who was still functioning with a chalkboard, as if they were stuck in the 19th century.  I purchased my own sheets of acetate so that I could use the kind which allowed me to burn typed images on them rather than inflicting misery on my students by asking them to read my handwriting.  I dreamed that someday,  perhaps before I retired, the technology might exist to sit at my desk with a keyboard and type in text which would appear on some sort of a monitor visible to the whole class. I relied on those old overheads projectors so heavily that one class, in preparing a presentation for their reunion, took a picture of me posed beside one.

The most technologically advanced thing that I did in my first  five years of teaching (1977-82), back in Michigan, was to use the Oakland County School Board’s equipment to create slides for a slide projector from photos in books.   This was a long and somewhat tedious process and it is no wonder that I have never known another teacher who did anything like that. In fact, Accomack  County,  so far as I know, never provided the technology necessary to perform that task even if someone had wanted to.  There did exist a machine called an opaque projector, which some used to  show their classes photos.   You can still see one of those projectors in the back room of Nandua's media center, but, most teachers just held the book open to the picture and walked around the classroom.

Perhaps the past technology that you’ll find the most  amusing is technique I had for grading papers. I had an answer sheet (made with a ditto machine) that was similar to a Scantron sheet (only purple, of course.).  In addition to the answer columns, the sheet also had two circles, which served as alignment guides, in the upper corners of the page.  Students would circle the letter of the correct answers.  These were graded with the “Blodgetron.”  This was  a board with two nails that were placed to correspond with the alignment guides on the answer sheets.  I’d punch each student response sheet down through the guides, stack them all up,  and then place an answer sheet with the correct answers on the top of the stack.  I’d then take a hammer and nail and drive the nail through all the correct answers, one at a time.  The final  step came when I’d have one of my daughters go through with a red pen with which she'd mark and total the incorrect responses--if the students circled a letter that wasn’t punched through, their answer was wrong.  I couldn’t find a picture of anything similar to this on the Internet, so I guess it was pretty rare--you might say I stood out technologically, even in those days.

Jim Carey was the shop teacher at CHS, and I believe it was through his initiative that all the teachers first got desktop computers.  With them, I was able to use a little device made by Aversion, which turned my classroom television into a desktop monitor.  Using a  scanner I took the slides I made back in Michigan and turned them into JPGs and  inserted them in PowerPoint type presentations, which I showed on the television.

Even though I’m an ITRT, I have to confess that I have been resistant to some of the changes I’ve seen.  For example, although I welcomed  DVDs I was quite disappointed when  Mrs. Heady quit coming around with the AV bus--some of those old 16 millimeter films were really good.  In fact, at Chincoteague High,  the library purchased a little box with a mirror for taking 16 millimeter films and recording them as Video Cassette Tapes with a camcorder.  Due to the difference in shutter speeds, this never really worked very well.

When the county first issued laptop computers to teachers,  I was quite overwhelmed by the extravagance of it all--after all, we had desktops in our classrooms.  As the years passed I came to rely on these laptops so heavily that I've gone several years without owning a personal computing device of any kind--what I’ll own in retirement is yet to be determined.  

Let me conclude by saying that this teaching experience has been a long and interesting journey in many ways, not the least of which has been witnessing the introduction of these technological wonders.  The future seems both clear and near--individual devices for each student--we'll be there before you know it.