Racquel T.

Alcoriza
BSED_II

1. Evolution of Educational Technology

Year Educational Description

Tool/Event
1635 First Public The Us Boston Latin School is founded. Noted alumni include Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams
School and John Hancock

1650 The Horn Book Wooden paddles with printed lessons were popular in the colonial era. On the paper there was
usually the alphabet and a religious verse which children would copy to help them learn how to
write
1651 Modern Library John Dury develop the modern library
1795 Pencil Nicolas-Jacques Conte creates the basis of the pencil by mixing graphite with clay and pressing
the material between to half-cylinders of wood

1868 QWERTY Christopher Sholes invents the first typewriter with Qwerty keyboard

1870 The Magic The precursor to a slide projector, the ‘magic lantern’ projected images printed on glass plates and
Lanter showed them in darkened rooms to students. By the end of World War I, Chicago’s public school
system had roughly 8,000 lantern slides.

1890 School Slate Used throughout the 19th century in nearly all classrooms, a Boston school superintendent in 1870
described the slate as being “if the result of the work should, at any time, be found infelicitous, a
sponge will readily banish from the slate all disheartening recollections, and leave it free for new
attempts."

1890 Chalkboard Still going strong to this day, the chalkboard is one of the biggest inventions in terms of
educational technology.

1900 Modern Pencil Just like the chalkboard, the pencil is also found in basically all classrooms in the U.S. In the late
19th century, mass-produced paper and pencils became more readily available and pencils
eventually replaced the school slate.

1905 Stereoscope At the turn of the century, the Keystone View Company began to market stereoscopes which are
basically three-dimensional viewing tools that were popular in homes as a source of
entertainment. Keystone View Company marketed these stereoscopes to schools and created
hundreds of images that were meant to be used to illustrate points made during lectures.

1925 Film Projector Similar to the motion-picture projector, Thomas Edison predicted that, thanks to the invention of
projected images, “books will soon be obsolete in schools. Scholars will soon be instructed
through the eye.”

1925 Radio New York City’s Board of Education was actually the first organization to send lessons to schools
through a radio station. Over the next couple of decades, “schools of the air” began broadcasting
programs to millions of American students.

1930 Overhead Initially used by the U.S. military for training purposes in World War II, overhead projectors
Projector quickly spread to schools and other organizations around the country.
1940 Ballpoint Pen While it was originally invented in 1888, it was not until 1940 that the ballpoint pen started to gain
worldwide recognition as being a useful tool in the classroom and life in general. The first
ballpoint pens went on sale at Gimbels department store in New York City on 29 October 1945 for
US$9.75 each.

1940 Mimeograph Surviving into the Xerox age, the mimeograph made copies by being hand-cranked. Makes you
appreciate your current copier at least a little bit now, huh?

1950 Headphones Thanks to theories that students could learn lessons through repeated drills and repetition (and
repeated repetition) schools began to install listening stations that used headphones and audio
tapes. Most were used in what were dubbed ‘language labs’ and this practice is still in use today,
except now computers are used instead of audio tapes.

1950 Slide Rule William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century based on the emerging
work on logarithms by John Napier. Before the advent of the pocket calculator, it was the most
commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering. The use of slide rules continued to
grow through the 1950s and 1960s even as digital computing devices were being gradually
introduced; but around 1974 the electronic scientific calculator made it largely obsolete and most
suppliers left the business.
1950 First computer The first computer used for instruction, a flight simulator, trains MIT pilots

1951 Videotapes The electronics division of entertainer Bing Crosby’s production company, Bing Crosby
Enterprises (BCE), gave the world’s first demonstration of a videotape recording in Los Angeles
on November 11, 1951. Developed by John T. Mullin and Wayne R. Johnson since 1950, the
device gave what were described as “blurred and indistinct” images, using a modified Ampex 200
tape recorder and standard quarter-inch audio tape moving at 360 inches per second. A year later,
an improved version, using one-inch magnetic tape, was shown to the press, who reportedly
expressed amazement at the quality of the images, although they had a “persistent grainy quality
that looked like a worn motion picture”.
1958 Educational By the early sixties, there were more than 50 channels of TV which included educational
Television programming that aired across the country.

1959 IBM the IBM 650 becomes the first commercially available digital computer. With a memory of 2kb, it
costs S500,000

1967 Calculator The first handheld calculator is invented by Texas instrument

1970 The Hand-Held The predecessor of the much-loved and much-used TI-83, this calculator paved the way for the
Calculator calculators used today. There were initial concerns however as teachers were slow to adopt them
for fear they would undermine the learning of basic skills.

1977 Apple Computer Apple computer begins selling the first personal computer

1981 18% of US public school have one or more computers for instruction

1985 CD-ROM Drive A single CD could store an entire encyclopedia plus video and audio. The CD-ROM and
eventually the CD-RW paved the way for flash drives and easy personal storage.

1985 Hand-Held The successor to the hand-held calculator, the graphing calculator made far more advanced math
Graphing much easier as it let you plot out points, do long equations, and play ‘Snake’ as a game when you
Calculator got bored in class.
1985 Oregon Trail The first educational game to be widely adopted by schools

1991 The availability of computers in schools is 1 for every 18 students

1994 3% of schools having internet access, President Clinton challenges the nation to connect to eevery
school to web

1996 1 in 12 students in formal education setting has computer access

1997 Email Distance learning is offered by 78% of public four-year high education though email

1999 Interactive The chalkboard got a facelift with the whiteboard. That got turned into a more interactive system
Whiteboard that uses a touch-sensitive white screen, a projector, and a computer. Still getting slowly rolled out
to classrooms right now, betcha didn’t know they were first around in 1999!

2005 94% of schools all around the globe have classroom with internet access

2005 iClicker There are many similar tools available now, but iClicker was one of the first to allow teachers to
be able to quickly poll students and get results in real time.

2006 Laptop The ‘One Laptop Per Child’ computer was built so it was durable and cheap enough to sell or
donate to developing countries. It’s an incredible machine that works well in sunlight, is
waterproof, and much more. Learn more.

2007 Online class Nearly 1 in 5 college students takes at least one class online

2008 Poll Though mobile phone, allowing teachers to live poll students in the classroom via submission
form text, email and twitter

2009 Online The University of Southern California's online Master of Arts in Teaching program, the
Education MAT@USC, becomes the first online degree program to include real time elements, like live
session, breakout rooms and collaborative learning

2010 Apple iPad Just like the original school slate, could the iPad bring Thomas Edison’s statement to life? Could
the iPad make it so “scholars will soon be instructed through the eye.” Only time will tell.

2011 As part of a pilot program, NYC public schools order over 2000 iPads for teacher and students

2. Background of Educational Technology

n some form or other, education has been around since the beginning of the human species. This is
because education, the process of facilitating learning, has always been a necessity. After all, without
education, no generation can be adequately fitted for the duties to perform in the world. Each succeeding
generation inherits the accumulated knowledge of the preceding one, generally becoming increasingly
better.
For most people today, school and education are considered synonymously. This is not surprising given
that the experience most of us will have in schools is what is arguably the most important part of formal
education. For example, it is within the school setting that most of us learn to read, develop our skills in
social interaction and encounter authority that does not come from a parent.
Indeed, schooling, as it exists today, and therefore education, only makes sense if we view it from a
historical perspective. Unlike other species, humans have always had the ability to organise, store and
transmit knowledge in sounds and language. Prior to technology, word of mouth communication was the
only type of education that existed. From the hunter-gatherer communities to the invention of agriculture,
beginning 10,000 years ago, people depended on word of mouth communication to acquire vast
knowledge of the plants, animals and land on which they depended.
Our understanding about the way schools first operated comes from ancient Greece, in about 4th century
BC. In fact, the word ‘school’ comes from the Greek ‘schole’, which means leisure. Back then, when
schools were available only to the aristocracy, the assumption would have been that leisure was
synonymous with learning. Elsewhere in the ancient world, prominent examples of formal education
were evident in the middle east, China and India, and their systems of education generally emphasised
reading, writing and mathematics. In these times, speech was the primary means by which people learned
and passed on learning, making accurate memorisation a critical skill.
Education in ancient Greece stands out during this era though, because of its diversity. It was the Greeks
who first created what we would now call primary and secondary schools. There was also a lot of
emphasis from an early age on physical education, which was considered necessary for improving one’s
appearance, preparation for war, and good health at an old age (Plutarch, 1927). Roman schooling
broadly followed the Greek model. There were small schools for privileged boys, which taught
grammar. Then, the boys attended rhetoric schools, to prepare them for public life (Thomas, 2013).
The first examples of educational technology in the ancient world were the tools that students and
teachers used for writing. Over thousands of years and across the continents, various surfaces have been
used as a medium for writing, including wax-covered writing boards (by the Romans), clay tablets (in the
middle east), strips of bark from trees (in Indonesia, Tibet and the Americas), thick palm-like leaves (in
South east Asia) and parchment, made of animal skin (common across the ancient world).

Wax tablet and a Roman stylus

Clay tablets were used as a writing medium,

especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the
Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Tens of
thousands of written tablets, including many
fragments, have been found in the Middle
East. Students in ancient Babylonia and Sumeria
inscribed their writing on clay tablets with a stylus.
These could be used wet and erased to be used
again, or baked to create a permanent document.
After the fall of the Roman empire, from about the 8th century, education was mainly the responsibility of
the religious establishment. This was generally the case throughout the ancient world. By the end of the
Middle Ages, and after the invention of printing (a truly disruptive technology), schools would eventually
become common in many towns and villages across Europe, with the main intention being to ensure
children could read and write. Then, by the time of Shakespeare’s Europe, in the 15th century, schools
had more or less become the education system that can be recognised today.
On the back of the printing press, schools gradually developed a curriculum in which the subjects
considered most important were taught. By the mid-1600s, the modern library and the pencil were
introduced, marking the first examples of educational technology. Later still, the 19th century marked the
advent of textbooks and improvements in writing tools available to teachers and students, notably
blackboards and chalk, as well as the use of ink pen rather than just pencil. During this period since the
middle ages and until the latter half of the 20th century, learning has primarily been focused on the
curriculum rather than the child. In other words, for a great many children, compulsory education has
been monotonous affair, marked by rote learning and memorisation.
The 20th century saw many sweeping changes though, in politics (revolution and war), economics
(depression and boom), science (huge developments) and technology (radical advancement), all of which
quickly spilled over into education. The 20th century was a key time in education, when the ideas of
philosophers like John Dewey really started to gain ground.

Essentially, John Dewey (1859 – 1952) championed the notion

of the child as an instinctive scientist: ‘the native and
unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by unspoiled
curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental
inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific
mind’.

For Dewey, like the philosopher, John Locke 200 years before him, reflective, critical thinking is the
centre of education. Education is not (and should not) be about memorising facts – it is about being trial-
and-error thinking, testing and analysing. Dewey went on to draw a distinction between information and
knowledge, noting that schools concentrate on the former at the expense of the latter. These ideas would
eventually crystallise into what has become the pedagogical movement, progressive education, setting the
backdrop for constructivism. Although Dewey himself did not use the term ‘constructivism’, his point of
view can be considered a type of constructivism. Dewey argued, for example, that if students learn
primarily by building their own knowledge, then teachers must adapt the curriculum to fit students’ prior
knowledge and interests as fully as possible. He also argued that a curriculum could only work if it
related to the activities and responsibilities that students will probably have after leaving school. He said
that schools should be concerned with the education of the whole child, including the intellectual, social,
physical, and emotional needs of each student.
To many educators nowadays, Dewey’s ideas appear common sense, but they were innovative and
progressive at the beginning of the twentieth century. Educational reformers and thinkers since Dewey
have simply formalised, confirmed and tweaked his ideas. Dewey’s core ideas therefore, have persisted
and continue to be the bedrock of educational practice all over the world today.
Aside from the transition to a progressive pedagogy, digital technology over recent years has had an
enormous impact on education. Representing the second main wave of disruptive technology since the
printing press, digital technology, such as computers, Learning Management Systems (LMS) and the
Internet, have fundamentally changed how students learn and teachers teach. Significantly, education is
much more accessible now, and teachers have the tools to communicate more engagingly than ever
before. Much of the content on Technology for Learners also showcases examples of digital
technologies, which help facilitate the learning process.
Taken together, progressive education and digital technologies, bring us to where we are today – moving
ever closer to a flipped learning model, in which students are becoming increasingly autonomous and
active in their own learning.

3. Importance of Educational Technology

1. Increased student engagement

When students get to use technology, they’re automatically more engaged. Kids love technology, and
incorporating it into lessons gets students excited about learning. Adding technology to existing lesson
plans can boost student engagement without requiring teachers to do a lot of extra work.
2. More collaboration
Technology makes it easier for students to collaborate with one another. Students can work on projects
together, communicate effortlessly at home or in the classroom, and share their work online.
3. Improve digital literacy
Digital literacy is a fundamental skill for students in the 21st century. Knowing how to use technology and
the internet will be required in almost every job that students might have in the future. By incorporating
EdTech into the classroom, teachers can help students improve their digital literacy.
4. Automate grading
In the past, teachers have spent hours after school and on weekends grading papers. There are tons of
EdTech tools that can cut down on this time, automating grading and making measuring student progress
simple.
5. Get student data
EdTech can also make measuring student progress through data much easier. Many programs can
automatically give teachers data on students, quickly and easily showing what skills students have
mastered and what they need to work on.
6. Stay in touch 24/7
With technology and the internet, students and teachers can stay in touch all the time. There are a variety
of apps that allow students to communicate with teachers (without teachers giving out their personal
email or phone number). Students can get homework help and teachers can send important reminders.
7. Keep up with classroom management
There are lots of EdTech tools designed to help teachers with classroom management. Teachers can keep
track of student behaviors and keep parents informed using technology.
8. Flip the classroom
The flipped classroom, where students learn through reading or lecture videos at home then do projects or
discuss what they learned in the classroom, is only possible through EdTech. This innovative new way of
teaching and learning is taking the world of education by storm.
9. Have more fun
EdTech can make learning more fun. There are tons of educational games and apps that get students
excited and turn learning into a game instead of a chore.
10. Get creative
With EdTech tools, students can do more creative work. Students can create online presentations and
digital art to showcase what they’ve learned.
11. Go paperless
Going paperless is a popular way for schools to save money (and reduce their carbon footprint). By
putting more materials online and utilizing technology, teachers can cut back on the number of copies
they make and save paper.
 12. Publish and present student work
Instead of creating a presentation that no one outside the classroom will see, students can use the internet
to publish their work for the entire world to see.
13. Do more research
Learning how to do research is an important skill that teachers have always taught. EdTech just makes it
easier. Students can complete research projects without spending hours in the library and can even
continue their research at home.
14. Learn to code
Computer programming is an increasingly in-demand skill. There are a variety of tools for teaching
students how to code, even in elementary school.
15. Teachers save time
Before the rise of EdTech, teachers spent long hours creating lesson plans and grading papers. With
technology and the internet, teachers can find lesson plans and free materials online. Plus, apps and
programs designed to grade student work can save even more time.
16. Raise test scores
EdTech can help improve student achievement and raise test scores. Tools that help with test prep and
measure students’ progress can help teachers bring up scores.
17. Bring the classroom home
With EdTech, learning doesn’t have to stop when students go home. Students can continue their learning
at home using the internet.
18. Find free materials
Teachers don’t have to pay for workbooks anymore. There are tons of free materials online that can help
busy teachers throw together lesson plans in minutes.
19. Turn review into a game
There are tons of apps available that turn review activities or test prep into fun games for students. This
can make otherwise boring review fun and exciting.
20. Personalize learning for every student
EdTech helps teachers differentiate learning. Students can each work on something different on their
individual devices, with each student focusing on their own areas of weakness.
21. Include ELLs
Technology can help English Language Learners feel included in the classroom. The internet makes
translating materials easier than ever, allowing beginning English learners to participate in activities that
would otherwise be too difficult.
22. Stop buying expensive textbooks
Thanks to the internet, schools no longer have to spend money each year on new textbooks. Information
is readily available online, and it’s more up-to-date than with old print books.
23. Provide remediation
There are lots of resources available to help remediate students using EdTech. Students who are below
grade-level can use EdTech tools to get caught up.
24. Provide acceleration
EdTech isn’t just for remediation—it can also be used for acceleration. Students who are bored with the
material the rest of the class is working on can complete additional projects and accelerate their learning
using EdTech.
25. Bring your classroom into the 21st century
It just makes sense to incorporate more EdTech into the classroom. Teachers are responsible for preparing
students for a 21st century world, and exposing them to technology is a part of that.
What other benefits does EdTech have for students and teachers? Tell us how you’ve seen EdTech benefit
classrooms.