From typewriters to Chromebooks

Walking into the average classroom today, one is likely to see computers on every desk and an electronic board on the wall. Rather than handing out textbooks at the beginning of each year, students join electronic groups on Google Classrooms.

When Peg Eblen first entered the Creston classrooms in 1989, everything looked a little different. Grades were kept in paper books and photos were developed in dark rooms.

As the yearbook advisor, Eblen has plenty of experience when it comes to changes in the print world.

"We only had two or three of the old Apple Macintoshs where the drive was right in it, but I feel like all we did on the computer then was the text," Eblen said. “We still laid out the pages manually, where you glued down the picture. We did a newspaper page for the News Advertiser every other week and we laid out our page manually through the wax machine in the columns.”

In the classroom, computers were a rare commodity. When Jon Thomson started teaching in 2004, teachers had their own iMac G3s for emails. For typing lessons and papers, students still used typewriters.

“I know that some schools were still the click-clacks, still the basic typewriters that would click and you would send it back over for typing class,” Thomson said. " I remember in school, I had the old MS Dos that we did typing on as well, so being a Gen X-er, I’ve gone through all the different types of technology in school."

The movement to newer technology took time. During her 15 years teaching at St. Malachy, Eblen experienced a party celebrating the introduction of the internet to the school.

“We had a celebration at the end of the day with the teachers; it was kind of just an exciting thing,” Eblen said. “That first year, there were lots of learning curves because we didn’t know enough about how to help kids navigate all of the things that were out there, like how to protect them, etc. We learned a lot of things, we learned them quickly.”

Once schools had internet and computers, it didn’t take long for classrooms and teachers to adapt.

“I remember we had bought a cart of Chromebooks. We had 18 or 20 Chromebooks and that’s all we had for the entire grade level. The idea was, if you have a lesson, you can just roll this cart into these other classrooms,” Thomson said. “I remember volunteering really quick to have that cart and the cart never really left my room. Eventually, we went to one-to-one with the students.”

As Creston’s IT director, Thomson has seen the changes across the district firsthand. Now, students K-2 use iPads and grades 3-12 use Chromebooks. While some teachers were wary about the use at first, the COVID-19 pandemic gave them no choice.

"Things have just happened so fast. COVID was a big pusher for some teachers that were still hanging on or were kind of on the fence," Thomson said. “COVID kind of gave a little push for some of those teachers to get out of their comfort zone and really dabble into more of the online opportunities and resources."

With all teachers now using Google Classroom for homework, a student can stay caught up even when sick or if there’s a snow day. Eblen said she’s also grateful at how much easier putting the yearbook together is now.

"For yearbook now, everything is an online software program; there’s graphics, you drop and drag photos into spots, you can change your font, everything’s right there," Eblen said.

However, technology also has its negatives. Eblen said with the way grades are now put online, students often have more anxiety about their overall grade.

“They sometimes expect me to be more of a video game response, like, ‘I turned it in, why can’t you grade it?’ Sometimes the work they turn in, I’m still grading it the old fashioned way where I’m evaluating it and looking at criteria,” Eblen said. “It doesn’t just automatically grade everything, especially in English.”

Teachers and students alike have had to struggle through the process of learning the ins and outs of new technology.

“Like a train that leaves the station slowly and suddenly it speeds up and you can’t process it, sometimes I think that the consequences on that are the impact on the kids,” Eblen said. “That’s the negative part for me. Whether that’s their phones and the social media and those temptations, if it’s AI to make a shortcut.”

Thomson has a much more positive outlook toward the future of technology in schools. He’s excited to see what teachers will be able to do with artificial intelligence and other innovations. Thomson said he’s already using virtual reality to help his students explore the world outside Southwest Iowa.

“It’s really taken our walls and made them disappear. With my first graders, they have a unit about foods around the world," Thomson said. “We took some virtual reality trips with some VR goggles and some iPads, and now we’re able to literally walk around in food markets in other parts of the world. Then we go deep-sea diving down to the Titanic or to the trenches of the ocean.”

No matter how one feels about the constant changes in technology, it will continue to speed forward. Just as a 1989 classroom may look unrecognizable to today’s student, the future for classrooms is totally unknown. Either way, teachers like Eblen and Thomson will be there, helping their students learn and grow.