http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/tech...chnologies

This past decade. Here's a few from the list:

"1. Scantron Sheets: When I first started teaching (in 1997) we would give multiple choice tests on Scantron sheets, which would then be graded by the Scantron scanner. Today, thankfully, high-stakes multiple choice testing has been replaced by the testing engines in the LMS. We also know that good pedagogy involves frequent, low-stakes testing - and that mid-term or final multiple choice exams most test students ability to take tests.

2. Overhead Projectors and Transparencies: Remember the days when textbooks would come bundled with color transparencies (matching to tables and graphs from the book) that we would show with the overhead projector during class? I remember doing lots of photocopying on to transparencies of my own teaching materials as well. For each class I'd have to lug in the "portable" overhead projector, as many classes did not have a permanent one installed.

3. Classroom VCR/DVD Playesr: The showing of any video in class longer then 10 minutes (save for film or media classes) has always driven me crazy. Nowadays any video should reside in the LMS (either linked to the campus streaming server or uploaded for shorter clips), available for students to watch outside of class on their own time. Not so long ago showing video inside of class seemed acceptable, nowadays that time can be used for discussion and debate."

I don't know, I could probably think of a better list that doesn't depend so much on money, but I'd have to replace the word 'obsolete' with 'obsolescent'.

I still use scantron sheets(and some of the other stuff)...what exactly have they been replaced with? I wouldn't call it obsolete if lots of people still use it(CDs, computers at school, videos in class...)

Weird, I wonder where he teaches. The classes I'm in still use overhead projectors like nobodies business.

Edit: On second thought I don't think this guy is in school or teaching and he probably just pulled this list out of thin air. Interesting hypothetical discussion but pretty irrelevant to real life.

Since when has the use of Scantron sheets even slowed down, much less been replaced by anything else? The article looks like an imitation of another article that's either trying too hard to fit in with the iChic crowd or doing a good job of parodying them.

I must sadly inform you that many poorer school districts still use VHS players and purchase new VHS tapes for their school libraries. At least in my district, we stopped using cassette tapes since 4 years ago, but we still buy both a VHS version and DVD version of many videos requested by teachers, since some classrooms still only have access to a VHS player.

Scantron and overhead projectors are alive and well, although each year a few more classrooms are getting outfitted with those accursed "smartboards" that are honestly fixing something that was never broken.

OHPs are definitely still alive. Smartboards are becoming more widespread, but I think they were forced into production 5-10 years too early. Not very nice to use. I wonder if I could hook up any sort of portable projector to my laptop that could just sit on a desk or something.

Heh, yeah my school's pretty much putting a SMART Board in every classroom now.. Half the teachers don't even want them. We're a pretty poor district, and many of them seem to agree that that money could be better spent elsewhere.

It's been a while since I've seen an overhead projector, but Scantron-esque sheets were pretty common up until recently. I don't remember using them once since the new semester started (then again, I have fairly lazy classes so ).

Why the dislike for SMART Boards? I've seen them used very effectively, and they allow for a lot more possibilities in teaching than regular ole' lecturing, dry-ink markers, and projectors. I think they're a godsend for classroom education!

Aijin Wrote:Why the dislike for SMART Boards? I've seen them used very effectively, and they allow for a lot more possibilities in teaching than regular ole' lecturing, dry-ink markers, and projectors. I think they're a godsend for classroom education!

Probably because a lot of school districts blow their all funds on them like kids at a candy shop rather than spending the money on things that traditionally "make a difference" like textbooks, computer resources, their libraries, or their teachers' wages.

What are smart boards?

Most of my teachers use their laptops with projectors for their notes. Some of them use white boards on top of that.

@jajaaan:
That's it exactly. Our school seems to think that having them makes teachers teach better or something (and apparently they make the school look better on paper so it can get funding, which is kind of ironic actually).

I like them; they're great pieces of technology but they're really just not needed in some cases. (We have a few old-fashioned teachers too).

And yeah our teachers aren't paid well at all, or so they say. It's a miracle we even have a school district

@Yukamina:
SMART Boards are big projector screens that hook up to a computer and act like giant touchscreens. They're pretty cool

I agree Ajin. They seem to have so much potential, but I've yet to have a professor that uses one. Bleh

No matter what new shit comes up in school - It'll always be the same

lol

I've yet to see or hear about a non-Australian drama that deals with the reality of school.

<3 Summer Heights High

nest0r Wrote:The showing of any video in class longer then

Noooooo!

I wanna know which school the person who compiled this list teaches at.

I've never had a class with a smartboard, but my university classes usually used PowerPoint or whiteboards/blackboards (or nothing). I think I only had maybe two classes where overhead projectors were used. I've never used scantron in university, but it's alive and well in standardized testing.

I had two classes last year (in high school) that used SMART boards: math and French. My French teacher couldn't figure out how to use it and would waste tons of time every class trying to figure out how to get it to do what she wanted. My math teacher knew how to use it, but I don't think that it really enhanced the learning experience or whatever at all. It was basically just used for displaying notes to be copied down. I actually still prefer projectors and blackboards/whiteboards. I definitely don't think SMART boards are needed at all in high schools.

(Tangent: What I'd actually like to see in high schools is less time spent on copying down notes every class. It doesn't matter if you're copying the notes down from a blackboard, a projector, or a SMART board, it's still a huge waste of time where students aren't really engaged. It's definitely boring, too. I think that teachers should maintain Web sites and post their notes there, and require that students either keep electronic copies of their notes—which would be better for the environment—or print out their own hard copies. This way, students could also read their notes before lessons, so that more time could be spent on discussion and answering questions. I also think that more teachers should encourage students to take notes on their own.)

Oh, and I also definitely had a test that used a Scantron sheet almost every week. DVD players were used lots, too.

Oh, I like smartboards, they are so shiny and techy, and they're like your own show and tell computers, switching between the different boards you've already used to explain different points, and switching to movies, programs, and youtube movies, I love 'm. So shiny. Though they are not that widespread yet.
I did notice the transparency things are getting old fashioned, I visit a lot of highschools as a studentrepresentative to tell the kids about my study in the past 4 years. In the beginning I always used those projectors, but slowly there have been more and more desktops and laptop computers with digital projectors springing up, and they've become more and more available to be used for our talks.

Isn't making notes yourself, and while hearing the teacher talking about it, a very good way to learn. At least for me copying down my own notes, is one way to enforce what I just learned.

Besides students and schoolkids don't prepare even if they are needed to, at least not where I followed any courses, and also not at the highschool I interned for educational courses, even though that highschool had it's system based on that. Most information and things were published within their digital environment and they were supposed to work for themselves most of the time, and the few classes they had were mostly used to discuss and spend more information on the hard stuff. But most of the kids were always behind.
I'll never forget the extra class in which I was supposed to go through some of the hardest genetic exercises. But spent all my time explaining the little bastards the most basic ones.
The schools I attended were rather strict though, for every book and assignment we forgot we had to stay another hour, or even a saturday if you got three strikes. So I guess coming prepared has always been a difficult point for most people. And having prepared and engaged students will continue to be a dream for most teachers.

My experience in university is that taking notes is a waste of time. It takes away from your concentration and (if you're like me) you only use them come test time. It is far better for profs to give outlines (or a copy of their ppt slides) out before hand so you can follow along in class and make BRIEF notes instead of trying to transcribe everything that happens.

If I ever go back to Canada I'll be teaching Japanese, and I won't make my students take notes.

My teachers actually have notes for class put online so we can get them ahead of time, so class time is more productive. I write them down by hand, it's just my preference. I find going over the notes manually, instead of just printing them off, reinforces what I learn.
Otherwise, there are no notes and it's up to us to pay attention and write down the important stuff.

I think for high school, writing notes in class is fine. You spend too much time at school to be doing so much stuff outside of class. I certainly wasn't very motivated to study in high school, compared to how I am now.

edit:typo

sugarlevi Wrote:Oh, I like smartboards, they are so shiny and techy, and they're like your own show and tell computers, switching between the different boards you've already used to explain different points, and switching to movies, programs, and youtube movies, I love 'm. So shiny. Though they are not that widespread yet.

I think they could be used to really enhance lessons and make classes more engaging. But a lot of the time that's not how they're used. Like you said, they look nice, dress up a classroom, and make the school or institution using them seem technologically up-to-date. But they're not at all necessary for a lot of classes. I didn't see them used for anything that couldn't have been accomplished using projectors, media carts, and whiteboards. They're also really expensive, and one of the universities where I live is investing a ton of money into equipping its classrooms with them. I know that this same university, however, laid off at least one professor one month before he was supposed to receive tenure because they're too cheap to pay tenurial salaries.

Quote:Isn't making notes yourself, and while hearing the teacher talking about it, a very good way to learn. At least for me copying down my own notes, is one way to enforce what I just learned.

Besides students and schoolkids don't prepare even if they are needed to […]

I think it varies from person to person. I didn't find that I was able to concentrate or actually understand material as easily if I tried to process it while copying it. A lot of the time, I think that students are just so focused on copying down the notes verbatim that they're not actually paying any attention to what they're writing. You just don't always have time to. (There's also the problem that a lot of students don't know that you're not supposed to write down every word, but even if you're able to take notes well and quickly, you don't always have enough time to really think about what you're writing down and work through things that you need clarified.)

As for copying notes to re-enforce what you've learned, I certainly think that's more effective than writing notes for material that is completely new to the student. But I've never had a teacher who expected a class to learn lessons before they were covered in class. In my experience, notes on new material were always taken first, and then the relevant textbook reading was assigned to be completed afterward. I would like to believe that if high school students were expected to prepare in advance, the majority of them would. I think that there's way too much handholding in high school, and that most students are capable of much more than they're given credit for. This is a pretty optimistic view, though, and I'm not sure if it would hold true in reality.

Jarvik7 Wrote:My experience in university is that taking notes is a waste of time. It takes away from your concentration and (if you're like me) you only use them come test time. It is far better for profs to give outlines (or a copy of their ppt slides) out before hand so you can follow along in class and make BRIEF notes instead of trying to transcribe everything that happens.

Yeah, I totally agree. I definitely rarely even looked at my notes, unless I needed them to do homework or was cramming for a test. I usually found my textbooks a lot clearer and easier to study from than my class notes, and a lot of the time I ended up tossing my notes in the recycling and just taking notes from my textbooks on my own or just not using notes at all. I haven't had to take notes from lectures very often, but I think that handing out an outline beforehand is a really clever idea and that having some structure would help a lot of students stay focused while writing their lecture notes.

yukamina Wrote:My teachers that actually have notes for class put online so we can get them ahead of time, so class time is more productive. I write them down by hand, it's just my preference. I find going over the notes manually, instead of just printing them off, reinforces what I learn.
Otherwise, there are no notes and it's up to us to pay attention and write down the important stuff.

That's really cool that you have teachers who do that. I think that writing your notes out by hand could also be useful for learning, and I've sometimes recopied notes to try to re-enforce material, but a lot of the time I just find doing that really tedious and time-consuming. Do you read over the notes before you copy them out by hand? That sounds like it would be a lot better than trying to digest the information at the same time as you're writing it.

Quote:I think for high school, writing notes in class is fine. You spend too much time at school to be doing so much stuff outside of class. I certainly wasn't very motivated to study in high school, compared to me now.

Yeah, it's definitely workable, but I think it's a really big part of why high school is so ridonkulously slow-paced. It also really does cut into time that could be spent on discussion, answering questions, doing activities in class, and other things more interesting than copying notes. Students could also have more time to do homework or study in class.

nest0r Wrote:2. Overhead Projectors and Transparencies: Remember the days when textbooks would come bundled with color transparencies (matching to tables and graphs from the book) that we would show with the overhead projector during class? I remember doing lots of photocopying on to transparencies of my own teaching materials as well. For each class I'd have to lug in the "portable" overhead projector, as many classes did not have a permanent one installed.

One great teacher I had used an overhead projector, transparencies and pens with different colours to demonstrate how a microprocessor moves around information (memory addresses, data, flags to the ALU, etc.) when carrying out an instruction. He had one transparency with parts of the microprocessor and put blank transparencies over it to draw on. For each clock signal, he used a different colour to show how information was moved on the bus between the memory module, the ALU and the caches.

I used Scantron sheets in almost every class during my last semester in school. Although they were mostly just for more important things: midterms, finals, etc.

VHS players are still very common, at least at my last school. DVD players are becoming more common but I see just as many VHS as DVD still. Hell, half the teachers I've had in the last ~2yrs of my college life were STILL having trouble trying to figure out how to get a VCR to work... Most of these teachers are also the ones who turn a computer on and then ask a student to help them because they couldn't figure out how to open their Powerpoint presentation after 10-15 minutes.

I did not know what a Smartboard was either until this thread... lol. Never seen one at any school I've been to. Then again, I've only been to 2 schools: A pretty horrible high school and a veeery cheap community college.

Jarvik7 Wrote:My experience in university is that taking notes is a waste of time. It takes away from your concentration and (if you're like me) you only use them come test time. It is far better for profs to give outlines (or a copy of their ppt slides) out before hand so you can follow along in class and make BRIEF notes instead of trying to transcribe everything that happens.

I agree with Jarvik. In my experience, so many teachers have become lazy lazy lazy. Then again, I see more kids in school that barely show up, and if they do, they don't pay attention or care anyway.

I'm also biased against the whole thing anyways. From my personal experience in high school and college, the education system in the US is for the most part, a train wreck.

That list would be better served if it focused on transitioning from existing technologies to newer ones while keeping cost in mind, with an emphasis on creative teaching/studying methods, processed-based around a kind of 'useful obsolescence'/'creative destruction'...

So what would the ideal RevTKer list be like? Some kind of SRS/blackboard (the BBS thingy)/computer lab system could be interesting.

That fellow went from West Virginia University to Dartmouth and somehow forgot all about budgets/prices in the meantime. Oh how quickly they forget their roots. ;p

By the way: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/01...board.html - Make your own Wii smartboard

Lots of interesting ideas and links to a cpl other resources I didn't know about, in the article/comments.

I use OHPs relatively often because not all the classrooms at my university have computer hookups; I don't use scantron personally but I know they are used at the school. We have some classes that have over 500 students -- obviously this is a mile short of ideal but we don't really have a choice, and when the teachers have a mandatory 2-3 day turnaround for giving and grading finals, scantron is basically the only practical choice.