Prompt #6

It is truly amazing to think how technology has evolved over the last few decades. I have been a student for almost fifteen years now, and it is even more amazing to remember what we had in my first grade classroom compared to what we have in first grade classrooms today. When I was in elementary school, technological advances were just starting to make an appearance, and that appearance was very slim. Some of the classrooms at my school has a single, cube-like Apple desktop computer. Attached to these big boxes were an even bigger tower, which made the computer run. We very rarely used the computer in the classroom. Most of the time, they sat shut off in the corner collecting dust until the end of the school year. Now that I look back, I think the reason we never used them was because our teachers did not know how to use them. There was probably never any formal training right away, and they were foreign objects to all of us! Another piece of equipment I remember were the old overhead projectors. While you still occasionally see them in a classroom today, likely being operated by a teacher who refuses to accept new technology, the noisy machines were staples when I was growing up. Now, they are obsolete compared to things like the SmartBoard or electronic projectors on the ceiling. When I entered into middle school, I remember seeing and using a lot more of the technology in the school. We had a library with about thirty flat-screened computers. We had to take classes just on computers and how to use them correctly. Assignments and papers were to be turned in typed, not hand-written like before. We started being forced to get a minimum number of resources from the Internet for research papers, where before resources were only obtained from books. When I finally got to high school, technology really changed for me. I started taking a few classes that were totally online, and that had no traditional classroom element whatsoever. I had textbooks that were totally online, and did not even turn in paper copies of assignments anymore, just submitted them online. All of my teachers had the newest SmartBoards (which I never knew how to use until becoming a teacher education student!) and most had a set of iPads dedicated just to their room. Many of my classes were held in computer labs every day because all of our work was on the computer now. I even had a math class that was totally on the computer! All of our homework, quizzes, and tests were conducted online every day. It is almost scary to look back and remember what we had in terms of technology fifteen years ago and compare it to what we have today. Technology is only growing now, and who knows what we will have in another fifteen years!