An Old Guy’s Story of Media

The need to train and retrain teachers has taken on increased importance as digital computers have arrived in schools. As an undergraduate student enrolled in a course on teaching methods, I made an appointment with the staff at a small media office and had them sign a sheet confirming that I successfully threaded a film strip into a projector and had operated a video cassette recorder. (It was the instructor’s intent that no one could have the excuse, “no one ever showed me how” to use the technologies that were on their way out of the classroom and on the way into the classroom in the mid-1980’s.) Within years of entering the classroom, the filmstrips were long gone, the video cassette recorders had been replaced with video discs, and those were quickly replaced with compact disks with movies, and then with online video.