My first computer experience was as a member of the computer club in Middle School. We worked on a Tandy computer, and learned how to write simple programs. There was absolutely nothing fancy about it. This was actually the first time I had ever seen a computer, and I think it was the only one in the building. At home I typed (and I mean typed) my papers on an old manual typewriter and I took typing in high school. I say typing, because that's what it was. We did not learn keyboarding, we typed (at least the school typewriters were electric!)
My brother got a personal computer when he graduated from high school. It was an IBM and used DOS programming. You had to insert a floppy disk every time you turned it on to run the program. Then you had to insert a different floppy disk to run the word processing program (I can't remember what that was called), and then I would print to a dot matrix printer. When he studied abroad for a semester I actually got to use it for my work. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
When I went to college, we had 2 computer labs for student use. We used Word Perfect for writing papers. All of the computers still used the actual floppy disks, and they crashed often. I can still remember hearing people scream in frustration as they lost their entire term papers.
When I began teaching, we still used an actual gradebook for keeping track of grades and there was one computer in the department office for us to use. Eventually we all got our own computers and actually began using computerized grade books. I couldn't believe how much easier it was, although all of the information was still kept on a disk. The Internet was just beginning to take off when I stopped teaching to stay home and be a mom. I only had a couple of students that last year who were getting information from the Internet and using CDroms.
When I got back into education a couple of years ago, I was astounded by how much I didn't know. My first class "Information Literacy" was a terrifying and exciting whirlwind of technology. I was thrilled with the potential that all of the new technology presented for lesson planning and learning. I immediately started revamping my old lesson plans and couldn't wait to implement the changes.
I have always found computers intriguing, and I have also found that I seem to be able to learn to use new aspects fairly easily. I think that this ability has helped make me more desirable as an educator, and it has certainly made me better at my job.
I'm glad that I got to mostly skip the typewriter era. I remember playing with the fancy model my grandparents had with the ability to whiteout and retype the characters, but I have far too many typos to have a keyboard be useful.
ReplyDeleteI've had to drag some of the teachers at my school wailing and kicking into the digital gradebook era. If it is not on paper it must not be real. I have staff that look up article on the internet and then print them out to read them right in front of the computer. It's a difficult transition and it's good to see people in the field embrace the tools.