-
My first memory of technology in the classroom was watching a filmstrip about what life would be like in the year 2000. The film imagined a future with autonomous flying vehicles that resembled small train cars, with bench seats around a table. This projector was very large and would be rolled from one classroom to the next on its metal cart. -
Our school often used overhead projectors, that would be rolled out from one classroom to another as needed. To use them, the teacher either used a plastic sheet with Vis-a-Vis Wet Erase pens, or a sheet with a preprinted transparencies to project images. -
Eventually our school upgraded to smaller, newer film projectors - and sometimes the students would be allowed to operate them! These projectors were placed on top of a stack of books, in the back of the room, on top of a student's desk. Although our school would later have a shared school rolling tv cart, we would continue to use both the older and newer projectors, throughout all of grade school. -
On rainy days, if we were very lucky, our class would get to watch an educational show on the rolling tv cart - a real treat! -
Our reports would be printed on a dot matrix printer, with the pages all connected along perforated edges. We loved to remove the small side strips of paper that helped the paper roll through the printer and fold them into chains. -
In the 4th grade we typed out a report in our school's "computer room." I remember being told that we were lucky to have received these computers from Apple because we lived in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley. -
We were occasionally allowed to use one of our teacher's calculators. She had a class set, one for each student, that we would borrow. -
In the fourth grade we could play Oregon Trail once a week in our school's "computer room" -
In the 80s we took all of our annual state testing on scantron forms. We turned the tests in to our teachers, never knowing how the answers were read. I don't remember seeing the scantron reader until college. -
In upper elementary school, many students began wearing watches with calculators on them. Teachers began banning them during tests.