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Chalkboard
Invented in 1801 by James Pillans, the "blackboard" was originally a piece of slate mouted to the classroom wall. In the 1960s however, they were made of a steel plate which was coated in green porcelain enamel in order for them to be easier to ship and easier to see. The green color was more pleasing to the eye, and it erased better than the black color, which held too much of the chalk dust when erasing. This was the first thing I saw when I started school at Wilshire Crest Elementary in L.A. -
Headphones
The first modern headphones were sold to the US Navy. However, school headphones had multiple uses. Students could listen to a book on tape, use them on the computer for an educational game, or for UIL Music Memory. -
Overhead Projector
Roger Appledorn, and engineer for 3M, created a transparency projection system that became widely used in not only schools, but businesses as well. This was the gadget that caused me to need glasses in 3rd grade. There was such poor focusing on those things, and they were always blurry to me. In junior high school, they came out with a new one with a "rolling" transparency paper scroll that you could continuously write on without stopping to get another sheet. -
TV and VCR
You KNEW it was going to be a FUN day at school when you saw this!! Teachers LOVED the Video Cassette Recorder (today's kids have NO idea what VCR means!) saved teachers from tons of boring lecturing, because they could just pop in an educational tape and Voila!! Instant teaching on tape! There was one in every grade I was in. By the time I was in high school, they had upgraded to the VCR/DVD combo. They were NOT about to throw all those VHS tapes away!!! -
Apple MacIntosh
Although Apple released this computer in 1984, I never used one until 1997, when I wrote for the school paper. The reason this compact guy was so popular in the Journalism world was because of a program called Adobe PageMaker. Anyone could create a newspaper using that program, which had the preset page margins for newsprint, and you could easily turn in your article, and the teacher could drop it right on the page they needed it on. It was great! Miss it!! -
Apple IIgs
This was the very first computer I was introduced to at South Ward Elementary. I was in Mrs. Tyner's second grade class, and the computers were brand spank new. We thought it was the coolest thing we had ever seen!! It was introduced to the world in 1986, Apple's 10th anniversary. It was designed by Steve Wozniack. It not only saved files on this big black thing called a "floppy disk," but there was a new smaller, less floppy 3.5 disk, which actually held more files and was faster. -
TI-108 Calculator
It's 6th grade, and YAY, I don't have to do all that adding in my head anymore! Why? Because now Math is twice as hard, and we don't have time for you to count on your fingers. So every Math teacher had a classroom set of these. Each one was numbered, so they know when one got lost. The TI-108 was introduced in 1990 by Texas Instruments; the ones who brought you the famous Speak & Spell and Speak & Math, and a plethora of high-tech (expensive) calulators. -
IBM PC
Ahhhhh 7th grade keyboarding class. The IBM PC. I had moved to Gilmer ISD, and got introduced to the PC and this thing called DOS. There were so many COMMAND/> prompts to remember, and I think that black screen made me go MORE blind than the overhead projector. It was however, the newest technology at the time. The International Business Machine was originally a calculator. That calculator grew into IBM's first personal computer on August 12, 1981. The model in the picture was introduced in 1990 -
TI-81 Graphing Calculator
Introduced in 1990 by Speak & Spell's own Texas Instruments, TI-81 was the first graphing calucator the company made for algebra and pre-calculus students. I was in a summer program for underprivledge minority youth at Kilgore College, and was given one of these for free as part of the program. However, with the severe Math Anexiety I had, it was way too much calculator for me. It was great for what it did. You could actually enter functions and get a picture of your linear graph. -
Dell Desktop Computer
High School Computer Science was SO much fun!! We got new Dell computers our Junior year, and a "new" operating system called Windows 95. It had Microsoft Office, where we learned how to create spreadsheets, data bases, and Power Point presentations. It was lightning fast compared to Windows 3.0, but then again, all operating systems are lightning fast when you first get them. -
iMac G3 (Blueberry)
I had come full circle once I made it to junior college. I was writing for the school paper at Northeast Texas Community College, who had just gotten this new gadget called an iMac. Oh wait! This is an APPLE! I remember Apple! It looked like a spaceship to me, but it had an old familiar friend: PageMaker! Good ol' PageMaker had gotten a facelift and was even easier to use with the "invisible" blue layout page on the screen! Just drag and drop as always! Loved it!
