Technology Moving So Quickly

Just a few days ago the teachers and students in our elementary schools celebrated the 100th day of school. The fifth grade at one of my schools ask the students to look into the future and write about what they thought the world would be like in 2113, a hundred years from now.

Throughout each of the essays, I noticed that students recognize what we know as well, technology is changing quickly and is changing our lives in the process. So this got me thinking about what the students of today will never experience, things that I did during my lifetime. My birthday is coming up soon and maybe that is playing a part in the thoughts of this post as well. Just so you know, I didn't "grow up" with technology. Remember it was the early 90's that the Internet became available to the public. At that time computers took up entire rooms! Check out this YouTube Video from The Today Show about the confusion of what the Internet even was.

So what are things that today's students will never experience?

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1. Reel-to-reel film projectors: Who remembers walking into class and being excited that a teacher had set up a film for the day? Then the excited that projectors came along that automatically advanced to the next slide? By the time I had my own classroom, technology had advanced to VHS tapes in my VCR! Never would we have dreamed of YouTube, Discovery Streaming, or Netflix.

news.Discovery.com

2. Cassette tapes: What about listening centers set up using cassette tapes and then right in the middle of the book, the cassette player eats the tape. I remember spending time reading books so my students would have something to listen to in the listening center! MP3 players have certainly improved the experience of creating custom playlists.

http://gizmofusion.com

3. Laser Discs: I can vividly recall the day our school librarian walked into my classroom with this huge shiny disc in the hands. Now I grew up listening to vinyl, so the size didn't strike me as much as the shiny look of it. She was so excited and begged me to come the library to see how cool this disc was. She plops into a machine connected to the TV and was able to use the remote control to find the exact track and proceeded to show me a seed growing into a plant (time lapsed photography of course). I was hooked and the kids loved it. Of course, since I was in a "learning cottage", we had to trek to the library anytime we wanted to view something from the disc.

http://www.lyntronix.com/35mm%20film%20canisters.jpg

4. 35mm Film: Digital cameras may very well be a thing of the past with the better quality cameras built into our smart phones, so students today will not know the thrill of taking photos, dropping them into the mail, and waiting a week for the images to arrive. Finally, opening the package to see how well the shots turned out. Oh wait, whose head was cut off in that shot? Oh, no he closed his eyes! How exciting it was when our little town finally got 1 Hour Film Processing!

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5.Floppy disk: I must confess, I love "the cloud." I no longer carry a flash drive around with me. So I will venture to say that students won't know about these soon either, not to mention floppy disk. Of course, I remember their migration from the large to small version of those.



Of course, these five items are just the tip of the iceberg, there are many more things that I could mention. Thanks for the opportunity to walk down memory lane! What about you, what do you think students of today will never know about or experience?