The Technology Graveyard

A new principal at one of my schools sent me an email stating that there was a bunch of technology in one of his rooms that I needed to come and do something with. I walked into the room and--on the top of the closets--this is what I saw:

All told, there were 14 overhead projectors in this room. They all worked. It's just that no one wanted them anymore; they've been replaced by document cameras and LCD projectors. When I started in my current position as CIO of my school district just eight years ago, there was ONE room in the district--ONE!--that had a dedicated LCD projector (The computer lab where I taught web design. We also had a SMART board!). Today nearly every classroom in the district has a projector (A few of the smaller rooms don't), and these old overhead projectors became unwanted.

And that made me sad. I thought about--in 1978--how enthusiastic some teacher must have been to have her new overhead projector carried into her room by the building principal. How exciting that must have been...to think that she was getting a top of the line, cutting edge piece of technology. And oh! If she were given one of those standard four color sets of overhead markers, too! No more white chalk on a black board. Now it was black, green, red, AND blue on a white screen!

And now they've been relegated to the technology graveyard, replaced, just like the above mentioned chalk board (replaced by SMART boards and marker boards) and the mimeograph machine (replaced by the photocopier and laser printer).

Technology marches on.