FTV: Educational Technology

 

          On one of the occasions when my mother’s father was staying with us for a few days back in the mid-1960s, I had an interesting discussion with him while playing cribbage.  Grandpa was never overly talkative so it took a bit to get him to carry on a conversation.  With the CBS news about the latest NASA space launch playing in the background, I asked him if he thought men flying to the Moon was the most impressive thing he had ever seen.  He said, “No, no;  the automobile is.”  When I related this to my father, he replied, “Of course he would say that – he was born in 1892 and grew up in the horse and buggy era.  Everyone knows the most impressive things ever made are big jet planes.  I am amazed that something so big can fly.”  

     Eventually, this all made sense to me because what one thinks of as impressive technology is influenced by what is being invented in your lifetime.  Born in 1919, dad often told us stories about what a big event is was when a biplane would land in his boyhood hometown of Wakefield, Michigan.  For him, big jet airplanes were a marvel when compared to the airplanes that took to the air in the first couple of decades after the Wright Brothers got things rolling (or should I say, flying).  Living twenty miles from KI Sawyer Air Force Base, my generation were so used to seeing the B-52s, tankers, and fighter aircraft crossing our skies on a regular basis that it was commonplace for us..

     For me, the most impressive thing invented, educationally speaking, is . . . the handheld calculator.  I am kidding, sort of.  The growth in the types of educational technology that I used (and witnessed being developed) in my time teaching began with a calculator.  The first year I taught in the Ontonagon Area Schools (1975-76), I had 125 seventh grade Geography / Earth Science students spread out over five class periods.  Our semesters were divided into three six week marking periods (similar to what I had been exposed to student teaching).  Rather than reinvent the wheel, I decided to use the numerical grading system my student teaching mentor had shown me.  Everything was graded with a number of points and the only time a letter grade entered the picture was when the final marking period scores were converted to a letter grade for the report card.  It was a simple system and it made sense to follow it rather than find another system to learn.

     Near the end of my second marking period in Ontonagon, I happened to be back at my folk’s house in Marquette for the weekend.  My mother watched me adding up the scores in my gradebook by hand. but at the time she didn’t make any comment about it.  Over a typical six week marking period, I would have about 20 graded items per student to add up and with 125 students, that meant I needed to process 2500 individual grades…by hand.  When Christmas rolled around, I found a nifty little Texas Instruments calculator under the tree.  The technology was new enough back then that they were not cheap.  I remember the first one my brother had to buy for a college Calculus class in the late 1960s that came in at a hefty $160 (and it replaced his slide rule, a whole different type of technology).  By comparison, tuition for a full schedule of classes my freshman year at NMU (Fall of 1971) was only $160!  Prices on these new fangled things had come down some by 1975, but for some reason, my old student teaching mentor and I were still doing it ‘the old way’.  Leave it to my mother to solve a problem I didn’t even know I had.

     What a revelation this little three by five inch marvel with the bright red digital numbers on its screen turned out to be.  I could now compile and double check all of my 125 student grades in less time than it took me to hand process one class worth of data.  There is a wonderful advantage to advances in educational technology;  when time consuming tasks like grading are reduced to a fraction of the time they used to take, one gains more time to be creative in coming up with classroom plans and assignments.  I hope I remembered to thank my parents many times over for seeing an obvious solution to a simple problem that seemed to have escaped my attention back then.  It may not work anymore, but I can not bring myself to throw it away.

     The standard educational tool for disseminating classroom assignments when I started was the mimeograph machine.  Surely you remember the smell of freshly printed handouts that would make one a bit dizzy as the copy fluid that had transferred the words to paper evaporated.  As a newly minted teacher, I learned that one could buy master sheets in colors other than the standard ‘blue’ and I was able to start printing up worksheets and maps in red, black, green, and blue!  I distinctly remember an older colleague standing behind me waiting his turn to copy something.  He looked at my multicolored print out and said, “I bet that takes a lot of extra time.  Why bother?  They will just throw them away when they are done with them.”  The smartalec in me replied, “Well, at least the custodians will have colorful garbage to look at.”

     Just as the slate board gave way to mimeographed handouts, the dizzying smell of copied paper gave way to toner based copy machines.  The first XEROX type copier we had at school made an amazing two copies per minute.   Needing a hundred copies of an assignment took some time so this did not get to be the ‘go to’ method for classroom assignments until the copy rate improved.  By the time I retired in 2018, it was possible to hit ‘send’ on the computer in my room and have the number of copies I needed done by the time I reached the office to pick them up.  At that time, the copier in the office was only 50 feet from my door so it was as close to ‘instant’ as one could get when creating assignments or background information sheets.

     On the grading front, computers began to make inroads to the information processing part of the profession.  I had gone back to college during the 1979-80 school year to finish my Masters of Arts degree in Geography.   My first real experience with handling data on a computer came typing out punch cards that were run through a reader.  The data from this scan was put on tape which was hand carried across campus to the administration building where the printer was.  There was a 24 hour turnaround between submitting data and getting back a printed copy.  If there was an error in the code on one of the punch cards, your box of data cards would be returned with the offending card sticking out of the stack at a right angle.  The printed copy attached to the box would have your name on the header and a message informing you the data could not be printed.  To cut down how many times the same data had to be carried back and forth before an actual printout was completed, one learned to type very carefully while making the punch cards.

     The same time I was learning how to do data entry on punch cards, the Cartography Lab and Map Library (where my grad student office was located) was outfitted with a computer terminal.  Each college department was given ONE of these stations and a thick manual explaining how they worked.  My advisor’s son and I were sharing the office and we were given the keys to the new car.  Pat (my advisor) said, “You guys figure this out and then you can show me how the (expletive deleted) thing works.”  Pat was a stroke survivor and his natural reaction to new things (like our new terminal) was some form of swear word.  

     “Figuring it out” for us meant learning how to send and receive messages and data on the university’s network.  Of course, we also managed to do a little minor ‘hacking’ of the system.    The computer geeks running the network would post little ‘happy messages’ each day and Mike and I learned how to edit them.  Nothing vulgar, just a minor tweak in the smiley face icon or a slight rewording of their ‘happy message’.  When the computer department sent out a cease and desist message to all users, Mike’s dad figured it out immediately.  He read us the note without actually accusing us of anything but the message was clear, “If they find out where these tweaks are coming from, they will take back the computer station from that department.”  The funny little changes vanished as fast as they had appeared, and no one ever questioned us about it again.  

     The Ontonagon Area Schools got involved in the computer game early on.  Bill Besonen was an early adopter of the technology and the district had converted two rooms in the math wing into a classroom /  computer lab.  Students were taught the typical computer skills of the day and when the Jr High moved into the building in the fall of 1983, the computer room and lab were moved across the building and their old classroom space went to JH science and math.  There had been a long window and a door installed between the rooms for the instructor’s sake so the first thing I had to do was get the custodians to put up four 4 foot by 8 foot fiber board panels to cover them.  The panels did double duty as they also served as a very large map display wall.

     About the time I got involved running ‘hands on science’ workshops for the Intermediate School District (ISD), our school district took a first stab at using computer grading.  I remember this well because when I came back from my first ISD training session in Escanaba, I had to go to school that evening and make my first attempt at running the marking period grades on the new system.  The program was on those thin plastic disks that gave the name ‘floppy disks’ to computer disks (the term was still used when they converted to disks mounted in hard plastic sleeves).  The program was primitive and only worked with percentage groups.  I had always done my grading in ‘points’ as in ‘each assignment was worth so many points’.  The only time I converted them to percentages were for the final marking period and semester grades.  Unfortunately, this program could only accept data that was already in percentages and it was a pain to convert all my grades before I could enter them.  The program also made it close to impossible to adjust the grade parameters to match the way the class data was grouped.  The grade level percentages were obviously set by someone who wanted anything below 60 percent to be a failing grade and all the grades to fall in a nice bell shaped curve.

     I came home and told my wife, “That is the last time I waste my time with that grade program.”  The National Education Association (NEA) had just begun promoting educational computers they called ‘EdStar’.  If one purchased one of their computers, it came with a host of word processing, internet friendly add ons, and (ta da) a grading program.  Once I read the specs, I convinced my wife how handy it would be for me to have this device at home.  She agreed and by the end of the next marking period, I was doing my data entry on a grading program that let me set the parameters.  Twice a marking period, I used to fill out a check list for my students so they could track which assignments were in or missing.  This program allowed me to print the reports for all my students with the push of one button.  My grade crunching time was again reduced by a large margin.

     The school district finally got around to investing in a different type of grading program but the final grade reports and cards were still being processed manually.  I asked if I could just keep using my program as long as I got the grades formatted for the final cards and it worked out fine. I stayed the course until the school adopted the third iteration grading program that would no longer allow me to manually enter data from my old program.  Principal Bob Carlson broke the news to us (about the new grade program) at our first faculty meeting of the year.  As an aside, he looked at me and said, “Which means you will have to finally learn how to use a grade program.”  It sounded like I was the old fuddy duddy who was stuck in the past, but in truth, the transition to the new program was a breeze.  With my past experience to lean on it was a breeze to the district’s new program.  It did all the stuff my old program did and more.  

     I actually liked this new version well and was getting pretty proficient at using it by the end of the second year.  Of course, we all know what happens when we get comfortable with new technology.  Someone with a higher pay grade than mine decided they had found a better program and another switch was forced upon us.  The new program was not nearly as intuitive to use as the old one and it was not well received.  After one year of constant complaints from the users (aka:  the teachers), this program was swapped out for one that a) was much more intuitive, b) resembled my original EdStar program format, and c) was universally well liked.  I was overjoyed that we used this basic format with occasional upgrades for the rest of my time teaching.  

     When the ISD expanded into the field of internet classes, the original computer lab in the JH-HS (my old room) was converted into a remote classroom.  The technology was impressive – big screen monitors, speaker systems, microphones hanging from the ceiling, computer interfaces, and state of the art connectivity between the ISD and the various schools.  The idea was simple – schools who could not afford a language class could import a class period of Spanish, for instance, from a school that did have a language instructor.  Like our earlier grade programs, the concept was not well received and there were many unforeseen problems for a teacher in Ontonagon to interact and control a class in another district and vice versa.  The idea  was good, but this classroom was underused and its original use faded away after only a couple of years.  Today, the technology to do the same thing can be rolled into any classroom on an AV cart.

     There was one positive that came from this first failed attempt to provide online learning.  When the superintendent in Ontonagon announced the cost of setting up this remote classroom, the teaching staff objected.  We said, “If you are going to spend that much money to export one or two classes to other schools, how about setting up a computer lab here and equip all of our classrooms with up to date computer stations?”  It took a little convincing but these ideas were added to the funding package that was presented to the Board of Education.  When the crew who would set up the internet connections for the ISD came to look things over, a group of teachers offered to help them wire the building.  With four techs from the ISD and a half a dozen teachers assisting, the Ontonagon Area Schools went from the computer stone age (so to speak) to state of the art in a few short months.

     When the internet classroom was finally disassembled, I picked up some cabling and a SONY ceiling mounted TV camera that was headed for the dumpster.  Before we were able to install an internet camera feed for WOAS-FM, I had a closed circuit TV loop from the station to my classroom so I could keep an eye on the joint from my classroom.  We have come a long way since then.  I can not say how much the DJs like it, but I get a hoot out of punching up our web feed (www.woas-fm.org) on my phone and texting them tips from time to time.  It never hurts for them to know that they can be heard AND seen broadcasting from our studio.  Technology and education have always gone hand in hand.  When I first put my little calculator to work back in 1975, I had no inkling how many changes we would see over the next forty years.  

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