Sunday, September 2, 2012

Filmstrips and Education

Filmstrips

Classroom record player
When I was in school, filmstrips were the height of multimedia coolness.

Many school film strips came with records so the operator would advance the film strip by one frame with each "ding."

This process be explained on each and every record meant to run along with the filmstrips.  I remember  the voice explaining that: "At this point, you should be on the frame with the filmstrip title that says (for example):  'Adjectives Describing Nouns.' If you are not on this frame, move forward or back to it at this time to that page.  During the filmstrip, you will hear some pings like this < PING > which will mean that it is time to advance the filmstrip by one frame.  Lets try it now. When you hear the ping, advance the film strip. <PING!>.  Did you advance the filmstrip?  Are you on such and such page? Well done!"
Filmstrip projector

 The techie kids were rewarded by the teachers and became AV Assistants (Audio visual assistants) who got to run the film strip projector (and the movie projectors which was a harder project). First, they would go down to the office and check out the appropriate AV cart, bring it upstairs in the elevator (reserved for teachers and special tasks), wheel it into the class, and run it.

Anybody have educational film strips for sale?  I bought half a dozen film strips a few years ago but would like to have more.

I also have an early film strip type of projector known as a magic lantern which had film strip pictures which are hand painted on glass. The light is not electric, it's an oil lamp!

The entire collection is housed in our office at LearningCity.com where elementary school teachers can get help with literacy and vocabulary from VocabularySpellingCity, help with elementary writing instruction from WritingCity.com (great implementation of Writers Workshop), and for K-2nd science from Science4Us.com.

9 comments:

candy said...

Hi, do you happen to have - or know where i can find - any digital audio or video recordings of these? I'm having a hard time finding any on the internet and I really want to use some for a music/video project. Thanks :)

Unknown said...

This just brought back so many memories from middle school. How exciting was it to walk into class and see one of these glorious carts. Not only did it mean a movie day, but it meant the joy of who go to be the one to play the film.

Such a great post!

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Unknown said...

I have a ton of film strips. If interested contact me at: alexaandrews1@aol.com

Unknown said...

I have a ton of film strips. If interested contact me at
alexaandrews1@aol.com

Unknown said...

I have a large number of film strips in canisters they range from science and english to science and history if interested contact me at Mommy_of_3_angels@hotmail.com

Unknown said...

I have a large number of film strips in canisters they range from science and english to science and history if interested contact me at Mommy_of_3_angels@hotmail.com

Anonymous said...

Anyone remember a series of strips that were supposed to be spooky? I guess they were middle school versions of horror flicks. Some of the stories that come to mind without knowing the titles include:

* an out of town visitor spends the night in an abandoned rat infested court house and ends up tried and hung by rats.

*a man explores a water well seeking hidden treasure. While dangling from a rope, he's attacked by a blob. He manages to escape but is haunted continuous by the blob.

Unknown said...

Hi, I have a filmstrip on the skeleton, entitled "Everybody's Got One!"