Classrooms have come such a long way, with ground breaking technology being constantly developed, classrooms too have adhered to newer and newer ways of teaching, communication and learning. From the days of old, with those huge projectors, to now, with the iPad, it's important to know how it all began, and how we have evolved.
One of the earliest devices for teaching, was, THE MAGIC LANTERN!
The precursor to a slide projector, the ‘magic lantern’ projected images printed on glass plates and showed them in darkened rooms to students. By the end of World War I, Chicago’s public school system had roughly 8,000 lantern slides.
Then, one of the biggest breakthroughs in classroom teaching:
The Chalk Board
Still used in various universities and in various parts of the world, this was definitely one of the biggest inventions at the time.
After the chalkboard, came another really important invention that is still used today,
The Pencil:
Believe it or not, there was a generation was there was no such thing as a pencil or a pen. Although we may not have been born in that generation, they are really important breakthroughs, and must not be overlooked.
The board was followed shortly by: The Film Projector:
Similar to the motion-picture projector, Thomas Edison predicted that, thanks to the invention of projected images, “books will soon be obsolete in schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye."
There was an emphasis on how it would be better learning through voice and repetitive listening, which led to the Radio.
New York City’s Board of Education was actually the first organization to send lessons to schools through a radio station. Over the next couple of decades, “schools of the air” began broadcasting programs to millions of American students.
Jump forward to the 1950's and here come the very first, HEADPHONES!! We still can't live without them.
Thanks to theories that students could learn lessons through repeated drills and repetition (and repeated repetition) schools began to install listening stations that used headphones and audio tapes. Most were used in what were dubbed ‘language labs’ and this practice is still in use today, except now computers are used instead of audio tapes.
Another thing we can't live without are VIDEOS!! Imagine a world without Youtube!
What would school be without videotapes? The electronics division of entertainer Bing Crosby’s production company, Bing Crosby Enterprises (BCE), gave the world’s first demonstration of a videotape recording in Los Angeles on November 11, 1951. Developed by John T. Mullin and Wayne R. Johnson since 1950, the device gave what were described as “blurred and indistinct” images, using a modified Ampex 200 tape recorder and standard quarter-inch (0.6 cm) audio tape moving at 360 inches (9.1 m) per second. A year later, an improved version, using one-inch (2.6 cm) magnetic tape, was shown to the press, who reportedly expressed amazement at the quality of the images, although they had a “persistent grainy quality that looked like a worn motion picture”.
Fast forward to the 1970's and you have your first, Hand-held Calculator:
What if we had to do all our calculations by hand, now that would be a pain! Another invention that took the world by storm was the calculator, without which our lives would be really inconvenient.
The next device has revolutionized education and is the basis for the very device from which I am writing this article. You guessed it, the Computer.
The Plato Computer:
Public schools in the U.S. averaged about one computer for every 92 students in 1984. The Plato was one of the most-used early computers to gain a foothold in the education market. Currently, there is about one computer for every 4 students.
Lets Fast Forward to today:
This just shows how changes in technology have gone hand in hand with changes in the classroom. With millions of dollars being spent on research and development, the future is definitely worth looking forward too.
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