Doing Life Together

I almost titled this post “The History of Educational Audiovisual Technology,” but that would be inaccurate. This is not a scholarly, researched treatise; it is merely a recollection of AV equipment used during my school days and also equipment I used during my teaching years.

I’ll start with my memories from the parochial school I attended from kindergarten through eighth grade, 1957-1966. Occasionally we’d all file into the auditorium to watch movies that someone thought would be educational. Sister Dora would roll out the school’s large movie projector and thread the film from a giant reel through the little grabber gears behind the big lens and into an empty reel below. Sometimes the reel would be so filled to the edge that the film spilled off the reel, and we had to wait while Sister struggled to respool it all. And afterward, she had to rewind the movie at high speed back onto the original reel.

I remember a lot of World War II-era newsreels of the sort that were shown in movie theaters before the feature film. These showed footage of battles and of interviews with soldiers, officers, and impacted Europeans and Pacific Islanders, and families of US military members. We also watched some nature documentaries, which I found infinitely more interesting. And once in a great while, we might actually get to see a Disney animated movie with no educational value whatsoever.

In high school, instead of whole-school viewings in the auditorium, we often watched curriculum-related movies in the classroom (such as “Pithing the Frog” in biology class). So that the teachers could concentrate on presenting the material rather than trying to remember how to run the projector, the school had an AV Club, made up mostly of nerds (think eyeglasses, button-down shirts and pocket protectors) who volunteered to spend their study periods operating the current technology.

During my first teaching career (1974-1978), the only classroom technology we had in my under-funded district was filmstrips. (I have a vague memory of seeing filmstrips when I was in grade school.) In my music classroom I had a few illustrated filmstrips depicting scenes from various pieces of program music, such as Peter and the Wolf and the Peer Gynt Suite. I had to reserve the filmstrip projector, and I played the accompanying vinyl record (actually, they were thicker and very brittle, so whatever came before vinyl—shellac, maybe?), advancing the filmstrip one image each time a little bell rang on the recording.

By the time my second teaching career rolled around (2006-2014), technology had advanced by leaps and bounds and every teacher had his/her own classroom computer with a DVD drive. A projector was mounted on the classroom ceiling, which could be paired with a VCR or the computer. I had a whole library of video cassettes related to the elementary music curriculum dating back to the 1980s, and I also had a number of DVDs and all of YouTube to draw from. Good times.

But one of the best innovations ever was PowerPoint. One of the professional development classes I took during that time was a PowerPoint workshop. I learned how to make and update a presentation. I could make my own visual aids and save them, so that I didn’t have to write, erase, and rewrite all the information for all my classes on the white board. Also, we had great collaboration in our district—teachers often shared the PowerPoints they created. I also found some posted online. I could edit them so they’d reflect exactly what I wanted to teach my students. I had a wonderful presentation about the Star Spangled Banner that I found online and added to, that included all sorts of information on the War of 1812. I used that for my patriotic unit for grade four general music.

Now it’s your turn. What sorts of audiovisual equipment do you remember from your days as a student or teacher? Or what new technologies have been developed for education? (I’ve been out of the classroom for almost a decade now—I’d love to know about new goodies.) Or what kind of viewing technology do you use in your own home? Please share in the comments below.