And then in Third Grade...

I am taking a technology class online.  This is the first class that I have taken since I finished my Master's Degree almost 10 years ago.  It has got me thinking about how the use of technology has changed the way that we need to teach and the way that students learn.  I loved school as a child, and I have tried to think about how technology was used when I was in school.  Besides the previously mentioned SR-80, I can not remember much technology at all.  In 1983, I was in the third grade and we got 10 Commodore computers in a computer lab in the school.  We went there once a week with our homeroom teacher, who, in retrospect, probably did not know any more about computers than we did.  We did typing exercises where we had to type the sentence on the screen.  Something about a brown fox jumping over something because it was a sentence that had every letter of the alphabet?  There was a lice outbreak in the third grade and they quarantined the students with lice in the computer lab because it was the room that was used the least.  How funny!  We have 4 computer labs at our school where I teach now, and I can not imagine using the lab as a quarantine unit!  I remember that the printer used the paper that had a perforated line with holes on either side that you had to carefully tear off before you turned your paper in to the teacher.  Ms. Yorkgitis was definitely not using the computer to teach different things instead of teaching the same things differently!