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THE HORNBOOK
In lieu of printed books, American settlers improvised with a device known as the hornbook. Adopted from England, the hornbook was one of the first forms of educational technology used to aid in teaching reading in American schools. A hornbook was a small, wooden, paddle-shaped instrument and it was a crude, low-cost solution to the American settler’s problem of how to teach children to read without having books available. -
PRINTED BOOKS
Perhaps the most popular early printed book was the New England Primer: Introduced to schools in 1690. The New England Primer was intended to make learning to read more interesting for children and it contained the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, each letter being illustrated with a drawing and a verse to impress it on the child’s mind. The primer also contained various lessons and admonitions for the youth. -
THE SANDBOX
In 1806, the Lancastrian methodology of schooling was introduced in New York City and with this new method of teaching came a new form of educational technology. Lancaster’s method of education was appealing because a large number of students could be educated for a low cost. Students would use a sandbox on their desk to practice the alphabet. Lancaster chose sandboxes because they were the most economically affordable form of technology available at the time. -
THE BLACKBOARD
While individual slates were used in classrooms during the early 1800s, it was not until 1841 that the classroom chalkboard was first introduced. Shortly thereafter, Horace Mann began encouraging communities to buy chalkboards for their classrooms. By the late 1800s, the chalkboard had become a permanent fixture in most classrooms. -
MAGIC LANTERN
The height of its popularity was around 1870. The predecessor to the slide machine, the magic lantern projected images on glass plates. By the end of World War I, Chicago’s public school system had a collection of some 8,000 lantern slides. -
STEREOSCOPE
At the turn of the 20th century, the Keystone View Company began to market stereoscopes. The three dimensional devices, which were popular in home parlors, were sold to schools featuring educational sets containing hundreds of images. -
FILM
The kinetoscope, which is now known as the motion picture, was invented in 1889. Over the next decade, film equipment was developed and refined. And in 1902, Charles Urban of London began exhibiting the first educational films. Among these films were “slow-motion, microscopic, and undersea views” and “such subjects as the growth of plants and the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis” (Saettler, 1990, p. 96). -
RADIO
Radio entered the educational system in the early 1920s. Like the early days of film, radio was heralded as a tool that would revolutionize classroom teaching. In New York City (1923) the first use the radio in classroom teaching occured. Following a decision by the Radio Division of the U.S. Department of Commerce to license time from commercial stations to broadcast educational lessons, many more schools and districts bought equipment and made plans to use the radio in classrooms. -
OVERHEAD PROJECTOR
In the 1930’s the overhead projector was widely used by the U. S. Military to train forces during World War II and eventually the device spread to schools. -
TELEVISION
Although it wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s that instructional television reached its peak, the first documented use of closed circuit television was in Los Angeles public schools and at the State University of Iowa in 1939. While the popularity of instructional television was rising between 1939 and the 1950s, the overall United States educational system was facing harsh criticism. -
COMPUTERS
CAI was intended to teach students a specific content area. Drill and practice techniques were common. “The student was asked to make simple responses, fill in the blanks, choose among a restricted set of alternatives, or supply a missing word or phrase.If the response was wrong, the machine would assume control, flash the word ‘wrong’ and generate another problem. If the response was correct, additional material would be presented.” (Saettler, 1990, p. 307) -
TEACHING MACHINES AND PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTION
In the 1960s, behavioral psychology contributed to the educational technology field by introducing “teaching machines.” Reminiscent of Tiu! Turk, an 18th century “computer” that wore a turban and played chess (Standage, 2002), teaching machines were intended to teach students through thoughtfully programmed instruction.Students operated the machines themselves and followed instructions on a screen similar to a television. -
LEAD PENCILS
Around the turn of the 20th century mass produced pencils and paper become readily available, gradually replacing the school slate. -
THE TYPEWRITER
While typewriters were present in most high schools into the 1990s, they have been absent from the majority of classrooms and not used widely throughout a student’s educational experience. However, there are close parallels between the typewriter and more modem forms of computer-based technologies. -
INTELLIGENT TUTORING
The field of cognitive science has exploded over the past decade and computer applications have emerged to take advantage of this new knowledge of how the brain works. Merging the fields of education and cognitive science has proven to be difficult. Bruer (1998) describes, “New results in neuroscience, rarely mentioned in education literature, point to the brain’s lifelong capacity to reshape itself in response to experience. -
LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Learning Management Systems (LMS), also known as Instructional Management Systems are online collaboration and communication tools which enable administrators, teachers and students to collaborate and communicate online in real-time across geographic distance. Some of the more popular commercial and open source LMS include Blackboard Learning System, Share-Point LMS, ANGEL Learning Management Suite, Sakai, and Moodle. -
THE CLOUD
Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network. At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services. Cloud resources are usually not only shared by multiple users but are also dynamically reallocated per demand. This approach maximizes the use of computing power thus reducing environmental damage.
