Teaching Technology of the Past

There are many teaching technologies of the past that have become obsolete in this decade. Consider some of the teaching technology of the past, which seems somewhat outdated compared to modern technology that appears in today's classrooms.

Overhead projectors and transparencies

Transparencies and overhead projectors had several major flaws. For one, they often mirrored graphs or images that were already in the textbook or elsewhere. Secondly, and most importantly, they were not interactive in any way. Students could "not get involved in learning" if that was their objective. Lack of involvement is not an option in education. Learning is based on involvement and engagement with the lesson. Logistically, if you were a floating teacher, you would have to lug this encumbrance from classroom to classroom all day long.

Microfiche

Card catalogs were bad enough, but microfiche was the media of previous decades to view old documents, meant as a tool to discover primary source documents. Honestly, if this information is not online, chances are, few people use microfiche anymore for research or anything else.

Scantron Sheets

Scantron sheets were quite popular in the 90s for quick pop quizzes and even semester exams. The problem with these were that they made it very easy to cheat; one answer skipped, throws off all the answers after; and they were scored by a Scantron machine that was prone to malfunctioning. When your top student scores 50 percent correct and your worst student scores 90 percent correct, something is wrong.

Classroom VCR/DVD Players

Any VCR or DVD playing should ideally last no longer that 10-15 minutes. After that, the class should have some other kind of learning activity that is related to the media viewed. Showing a full-length movie of a book or short story read in class was acceptable. Again, it is not interactive unless the teacher makes it interactive by requiring students to answer questions during the stop-and-go video, with discussion inserted in between scenes. Students hate it at first, but once they know there are interruptions, they get used to it and cooperate fully because they want to see what happens next, even when they know what happens next.

There are other technologies that one could add to this partial list, of course, with many long obsolete classroom technologies. Thankfully, educators have many options these days for technologies that assist in the classroom to keep students engaged and involved.