Educational Technology of Yesteryear

 At VocabularySpellingCity headquarters, we collect vintage educational technology.  We like to remember that we are not the first generation that is “revolutionizing” education. 

The integration of technology into education has been a thrilling challenge and adventure for a hundred years now! Here’s some high points of the ongoing revolution, all items are from the VocabularySpelling Collection.

This library card catalog is our most recent addition. It was donated by a local elementary school who said it was otherwise destined for the trash.

Library Card Catalog

When I was in school in the 1960s and 70s, learning these card catalogs and the associated Dewey Decimal System was an essential research skill.

These record players were often used as part of an audio visual presentation with a film strip.

Film Strips

 

The records (later audio cassettes) would start by explaining that this was an audio track to be used with the film strip and that a person would need to move the film strip forward when they heard a beep. Then, they’d explain that the film strip should be on the title page at this time.

Finally, it would say that we are now going to play a beep and then you should move forward one frame.

It was a great treat to be the student who was allowed to control the film strip projector.

Another highlight  of old technology in the collection is the typewriter. For a century prior to the introduction of electric typewriters, and digital word processors, there were typewriters which coupled with carbon paper, were the defacto when of creating formal documents.

 

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who remembers that “cc” use to mean a carbon copy of the original was made.

As carbon paper has disappeared, the term seems to have been redefined to mean “courtesy copy.”

 

In the Retro Educational Technology Collection, there are lots more.

Click through to see more the vintage educational tech materials in the SpellingCity HQ office collection.

 

A Manual Mimeograph Machine

A vital part of the educational infrastructure was the technology in schools for printing worksheets, tests, and handouts of information. In the RetroEdTech.com collection, there are a pair of mimeograph machines, both manuals which meant they had to be cranked by hand.  When I was in K12 in the 60s and 70s, there were two types of copying machines in the schools. There was what we called mimeograph machines (pictured here) which produced up to 50 copies which are very memorable because of the blue ink which made the printed papers smell so nice. There were also stencil machines which produced copies with black ink and could make hundreds of copies from a single stencil

Here is a Standard Rocket 1961 mimeograph machine.  I’m still looking for the electric version of this that was dominant during the 1960s and 1970s.

I’d like to mention one other set of technologies which is rarely visible in schools any more, dictionaries and encyclopedia. I have in the collection two complete sets of World Bank Encyclopedias and an old style complete dictionary.

 

World Book Encyclopedia 1962

A Random House Dictionary of the English Language

Laterna Magica or The Magic Lantern

Magic Lantern

I was thrilled when, in a flea market, I ran across a beautiful old Magic Lantern. 

With just a bit of haggling and a surprising small amount of cash, I took it home. It turns out that eBay and flea markets are awash in these small size magic lanterns.  

A magic lantern predates movies and slide. Essentially, it was a pre-electric version of a slide projector. They were popular in the late 1800s and into the start of the 1900s.

Mine is about ten inches tall, comes with the original box and slides, and has the little metal oil lantern that provided the light source.

Magic Lantern circa 1905

It appears to be a GBN toy magic lantern, similar to one that I found on the UK National Media Museum which cites a 1905 date.  But mine has metal legs and a different sort of chimney.  The toy ones are the ones for home use.    Wikipedia says:  The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen.^[1] Main light sources used during the time it was invented in the late 16th century were candles or oil lamps. These light sources were quite inefficient and produced weak projections.  

As I dug into this, I discovered online the Magic Lantern Society. They say; Introduced in the 1600's, the magic lantern was the earliest form of slide projector and has a long and fascinating history. The first magic lanterns were illuminated by candles, but as technology evolved they were lit by kerosene, limelight, carbon arc, and electric light.

I emailed them and quickly got this response:  The Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern does not cite GBN, but the companies making toy lanterns were mostly in Nuremburg, Germany. You are fortunate to have the box and slides that fit as well as the lantern. Is there an illuminant? Toy lanterns were very popular for children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You see them in movies such as Fanny and Alexander. Magic lanterns were once a premium for a childrens'  magazine in the early 20th century. They were used both to entertain but also to teach.

Larger lanterns were used in schools, churches, Secret Societies, and as the machine that brought Illustrated Lectures of travel, science, history and religion to the citizens of towns all across the country, We estimate there were over 100,000 magic lantern showmen, ie, people, mostly but not all men, who gave lectures and shows using the magic lantern. If you go on ebay you will see the wide range of magic lantern slides still in circulation.

If you are interested in the Magic Lantern and want to know more, the Magic Lantern Society has a quarterly research Journal that it publishes and a monthly enews letter of less scholarly news. We  have a bi-annual convention. If you are on the West Coast, it is a great chance to meet other collectors and to mine their knowledge of yourlantern and other interests.  We are an interesting group of people who collect lanterns, or slides or ephemera or whatever about the lantern and the culture around it. It was everywhere in the 19th and 20th centuries.  

This article was first published in 2012 and republished in 2025.

There is a Magic Lantern Society with get togethers and a website: http://www.magiclanternsociety.org/

UPDATE: In August of 2018, we finally tried lighting our magic lantern! And about a week after that, I noticed a Magic Lantern in the nursery of Mr. Banks' house (where Mary Poppins worked).

Vintage School Desks

We all went to school and we all sat at school desks.   We sat at school desks for hours and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months, and years and years.

We started sitting at school desks in kindergarten and sat at them for the thirteen years of K-12. I added four more years sitting at school desks for college and then two more for grad school.

Schools desks come in many shapes and sizes.  An amazing moment for many adults is when they visit a kindergarten and they see the teeny tiny little desks. It's hard to imagine how tiny we once were.

One thing that all the school desks seem to have in common is how industrial strength they were.  Strong enough to stand up to years of leaning and banging.  In the old days, they were attached to the floor. I have several in which the back of one row of school desk is the desk for the row behind them.

Contemporary School Desk

When I think about school desks, I remember an odd but true story.

Rural Classroom in Sangmelima, Cameroon, Africa

When I was in my early 20s, I lived in a small town in Southern Cameroon called Sangmelima. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer.  There was another volunteer in my town who was friends with a local carpenter who we called "Uncle."  Uncle was a little less than responsible and he had a few kids and a wife with a very sharp tongue. One day as we stopped by, we heard her chewing him out for failing to come up with the money for the school fees, apparently their boy had just been sent home from school since the fees were overdue.

Vintage School Desk 

The other volunteer and I quickly loaned him money for the fees and walked with him and his son back to the school to sort things out.

It turns out the problem wasn't just the fees but as the teacher explained and pointed out, she had thirty desks and thirty students. Although he now had the cash, the seats were quite literally, all full.  So Uncle turned on the charm and she finally agreed that if she had more desks and chairs, she would accept the boy back into school. So we went back to Uncles house and it only took him a few hours to build another four school desks. We marched them over to school, set them up, and she accepted him back into school.

When I was young, I went to school  in London and one of our subjects was penmanship.  We had fountain pens that we would fill up with ink from the ink wells and try to carefully copy over our lessons. I was terrible. Ink would blot, I'd have ink all over my hands and sometimes on my desk and clothes. And that was on the days when I was trying not to make a mess, not counting the moments when they would leave us alone and we would flick ink at each other.

SRA, Golden Books, and Card Catalogs

I took this picture in the hallway of our office.  What a great collection of classic educational materials....

A Library card catalog,  a SRA box and a Golden Book

Sitting on a classic elementary school card catalog, there is a box of the SRA materials with an old Golden Book and just the corner of an old World Book Encyclopedia.  Does that bring back memories or what?

This is part of the RetroEdTech collection curated by the president of Time4Learning in their offices.  For more info on each items:

Card Catalogs - Card catalogs were the key to every school and public library.  Users could look up books by either author or title and then find them on the shelves. They conceptual organization was the Dewey Decimal System and each library had its own physical layout and maps to where to find the books.  (Quoting from Wikipedia). The Dewey Decimal Classification organizes library materials by discipline or field of study. Main divisions include philosophy, social sciences, science, technology, and history. The scheme is made up of ten classes, each divided into ten divisions, each having ten sections. The system's notation uses Arabic numbers, with three whole numbers making up the main classes and sub-classes and decimals creating further divisions. The classification structure is hierarchical and the notation follows the same hierarchy. Libraries not needing the full level of detail of the classification can trim right-most decimal digits from the class number to obtain a more general classification.^[39] For example:

500 Natural sciences and mathematics

510 Mathematics

516 Geometry

516.3 Analytic geometries

516.37 Metric differential geometries

516.375 Finsler Geometry

As I read about the Dewey Decimal System today, I think of the original web directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ and wonder whether they used or leveraged the Dewey System. BTW, Yahoo's directory shut down in 2014, DMOZ in 2017 per Wikipedia.

Golden Books - The Golden Books are a great collection of kids books both story books and informational text. The Poky Little Puppy was the most popular and a particular favorite of mine.  We had the 45 record of it which I remember listening to time and time again. 

SRA - Did personalized instruction start with those SRA reading cards and boxes that were so popular in the 1960s and 70s?  Probably not since the old one room school houses and many other educational systems presumably had systems for perssonalized or student-paced instruction. But SRA was probably a major milestone in that it was broadly used and had a defined widely used system for student paced and individualized reading. The SRA box, properly called the Reading Library Kits from  Scientific Reading Associates, was a widely used system developed by Don Parker for personalizing learning and having students take some ownership of their reading.    I'd like to research this more but here's a few notes from Audrey Waters Hacked Education Blog on SRA.

The cards were purposefully designed as an alternative to whole class instruction, so that students could focus on activities aimed at their particular (reading) level and move forward at their own pace. “I wanted, somehow, to individualize instruction,” Parker says in his story. Individualized instruction is often branded as “personalization....

The SRA Reading Laboratory Kit was first published in 1957, with a suggested sale price of $39.95 per box. IBM acquired SRA in 1964. It sold SRA to Maxwell Communications Company in 1988, and when the latter tried to stage a hostile takeover of CTB/McGraw-Hill the following year, the SRA assets became part of a new company, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill.

McGraw-Hill continues to publish the SRA Reading Laboratory – in print and as software – to this day. Over 127 million children have used the product.”

If you like this nostalgia, you might like reading about dictionaries and Encyclopedias.

Edison Gold Moulded Records - Very Early Record Players

 Here's a question that almost nobody seems to wonder about it except me.  What came first, the first voice recording or the first telephone call?

The first call - at least as far as most history books go - was by Thomas Edison in 1876 who summoned his assistant with the famous line: "Watson, come here, I need you.".  

The first recording seems to have been in the decades before in France but it might not count since the recording was not intended to be played back. It was intended by the inventor to be traced and looked at, a little like a photograph of the voice.

If we only focus on Edison, he made his first phone call a year before he first recorded and played back his first sounds.  

A decade later, Edison launched his business selling his recording and playback devices.

In 1902,  the Edison Gold Moulded system went on a sale and in 2015, I bought myself one along with some of the wax cylinders. It is sadly not in working condition.  

Introducing my Edison Gold Moulded Record Machine. It basically has a cyclinder with the recording on it which spins, a needle that follows a groove. The needle connects to a metal tube which progressively expands like the end of a trumpet which amplifies the sound like a cheerleader’s megaphone. Incredibly simple!

Edison Gold Moulded Records

Edison Phonograph Cylinders

I started reading about it on the University of California website. Here's a little info:

The "Gold-Moulded" process, developed in 1902, significantly ameliorated these limitations (ed: uneven quality, limited number of quality copies etc). The process involved creating a metal mould from a wax master; a brown wax blank could then be put inside the resulting mould and subjected to a preestablished and precisely calibrated level of heat. As the blank expanded, the grooves would be pressed into the blank, and after cooling, the newly moulded cylinder could be removed from the mould. The "gold" from its namesake is derived from the trace levels of the metal that were applied as a conductive agent in creating the initial mould from the wax master. With Edison Gold-Moulded cylinders, playback speed was standardized at 160 revolutions per minute (RPM). The number of grooves on gold-moulded cylinders remained the same as for brown wax cylinders, at 100 TPI, or threads per inch.

Want to see:

- All my record players and victrolas?
- My mimeograph machines?

- My old telephones?

- My Magic Lantern?
  

Mid Century Modern Green Dial Telephone

Thanks to Etsy, I just added a Mid Century Modern dial phone to my collection. It’s got that green color so popular in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

 Click for more glimpses of my vintage and antique phone collection. 

vintage and antique phone collection which includes some candlesticks and some kitschy cute 60s phones.

Want to see more vintage and antique phones from the collection?

About John Edelson and VocabularySpellingCity

Hi, I’m the founder and president of VocabularySpellingCity.  Around the office, they sometimes call me the Mayor. Here’s the news:  We have expanded to where we are now LearningCity!

LearningCity is a family of three super cool edtech products to elementary schools. All three align to our mission of improving reading and literacy skills. VocabularySpellingCity and WritingCity are both literacy products. Science4Us  also builds STEM and science skills and interest in the vital early education years while also building literacy and math skills.

All these products use game-like approaches to engage students and a variety of tools to improve teacher productivity.

For those of you that have followed us since our SpellingCity days, or who are still using our free spelling practice and automation services, I’d advise you tolook at what our Premium Membership offers.  It takes the  fun convenient SpellingCity framework and applies it scientifically to the critical needs in building reading comprehension of vocabulary retention. Here’s some info on that product evolution.  I’d like to call out the novel technology that we created for helping students see the sounds that correspond to letters and letter combinations (patent 10,387,543).

About Me – John Edelson 

I made video games for the Playstation for years including being the producer on Croc, Legend of the Gobos, a Sony Playstation game that went Platinum.  One day, I decided to focus on educational software and games which I’ve been doing for almost 15 years. The Mayor loves to visit schools and hear directly from teachers and students I also spent two years in the Peace Corps in Cameroon in West Africa. And I worked in Silicon Valley at legendary tech companies such as SGI and The 3DO Company. Feels like a galaxy far far away. I have three hobby blogs. In one, I highlight my collection of vintage educational technology like film strip projectors and mimeograph machines. I also collect playing card jokers . The third blog  discusses my ambitions to earn a black belt by the time that I turned 50 (which I did) and my efforts to stay fit since then across various sports. I think education should be much much much better than it is today and that technology and improved funding and management are huge parts of getting there.  And I have degrees from Yale and Harvard. And I’m a pretty good listener so if you have something to share with me, give me a try.  You can reach me by commenting below, emailing “mayor@…”, or via my Twitter feed @VSpellCityMayor OK, now more formally: Seeing how students write is one of the best indicators of their literacy skills. John Edelson is the president and founder of Vkidz Inc which includes VocabularySpellingCity, Science4Us (K-2nd Science, CODiE & BESSIE Winner),  and WritingCity, a complete elementary writing program with detailed lesson plans based on the Writers Workshop approach . He serves on the Advisory Board for the Florida Atlantic University School of Education. He has a long involvement in interactive software, games, and simulations, starting with his years at Silicon Graphics in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At The 3DO Company in the early and mid ’90s, he was involved in the generational video game transition from 2D sprite graphics to games with real-time 3D photorealistic graphics and physics engines.

Mr. Edelson was the producer on Croc, Legend of the Gobos, a Sony Playstation game that went Platinum. He was the turn-around manager at Argonaut – a 100-person diversified games and technology company in London. He managed it for two years, improving quality, growth, and profitability. He spun-out and joined ARC, a new company in the semiconductor intellectual property industry. Mr. Edelson, as Senior Vice President of ARC, helped the company grow from 10 to 300 people. He consulted to Vcom3D, an educational software company for the deaf and hard of hearing, as well as Time2Read, an educational software company providing standards-based online programs to elementary school systems. Mr. Edelson has previous professional experience at MID and Price Waterhouse Consulting.

John Edelson has a BA cum laude from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. He served in the Peace Corps in West Africa for two years. As the proud father of three children, Mr. Edelson has a deep interest in improving education through technology. Oh,  for you academics and  learning scientists out there, I’m very proud to say that Danny Edelson of BSCS, xNational Geographic, and xProfessor at Northwestern, is my brother.

VocabularySpellingCity – What is it?

Games on VocabularySpellingCity.

VocabularySpellingCity is a supplementary language arts program for building reading comprehension through vocabulary retention and building foundational literacy skills. It is compatible with most published curriculum or for schools that are building their own.

One of our touch points is the following insight into today’s educational challenges.

Seventy percent of reading comprehension problems are due to vocabulary weakness.  Most schools and districts are only beginning to deal with building an effective vocabulary-building program. Many are still hoping that if the kids read enough, they’ll absorb vocabulary through exposure, context clues, and word roots and suffix knowledge (NOTE, this isn’t generally effective).  Other schools work with explicit instruction but are stuck on the weekly word list routine where students learn the words for Friday but have forgotten them by Monday (both research and common sense converge in saying that this weekly cycle is not effective).  VocabularySpellingCity’s mission is to help schools and districts build an effective vocabulary-building strategy and support it with effective training and powerful game-based learning tools.

Our History: VocabularySpellingCity started as SpellingCity, an extremely clever architecture and technology tour de force, which conveniently automated the weekly spelling test.  Teachers and parents loved the convenience, students loved the empowerment and games.

SpellingCity built a word bank of nearly 50,000 and provided human-written and spoken sentences for each word. SpellingCity built needed capabilities for handling multiple meaning words, sound-alike words, heteronyms (same spelling, different pronunciation and meaning, ie I fish for bass while playing the bass), capitonyms (same spelling except for capitalization ie I may march in May or March), and so on. With these capabilities and both a free and premium membership,  SpellingCity went viral around the country and world.

The Premium Membership – available for districts, schools, teachers, or parents – automated grading and record-keeping and provided the best games plus the vocabulary, phonics, and writing materials. SpellingCity broadened its technology base including pictures for many words and providing an automated sound by sound breakdown for each word with each sound correlated with

the right letter combinations. The learning activities including activities for phonological awareness (hearing initial and ending sounds, recognizing spoken words). SpellingCity continued to grow and usage was spread into the primary grades and across the web, Chromebooks, and tablets via the apps.   After a few years, SpellingCity started searching for how to have the most impact on education by studying what the real challenges and questions were.

Vocabulary Retention Enables Through Spaced Practice

Vocabulary quickly emerged as a huge problem in education and so we focused on building programs for vocabulary-building and renamed ourselves VocabularySpellingCity.  By 2016, we realized that the conventional weekly word list was largely ineffective at accumulating vocabulary. Students would memorize the words for the test on Friday but would tend to forget them by the week. In reviewing the research, we learned that a key to building vocabulary was 12-15 multimedia (hearing, reading, writing) contacts with a word over a four week period.  Other research-based insights included having a vocabulary program integrated with the general curriculum and focusing on the strategic academic words, not just the impressive-sounding or even general vocabulary.

VocabularySpellingCity Today – Today, we are very focused on helping schools and districts realize their goals for improving reading comprehension, writing skills, and vocabulary. We use technology to:

 

• 

  
  

  Dillard Student Engaged in Word Study

  Engage and empower students.  VocabularySpellingCity empowers students to do their own formative assessment which is dramatically emnpowering and engaging.  It’s hard for students to figure out if they have mastered a list of words and are ready for a vocabulary or spelling test. With VocabularySpellingCity, they can figure through the always-available practice tests whether they’ve achieved mastery or not, the can tell if they still have more progress to make.

• Build literacy skills in an integrated holistic fashion with a focus on vocabulary-building and sound-letter correspondence.  Having trouble with a word? Let’s study its meaning, sounds, or try to write a sentence with it. Students learn how words are used in context.
  • Save teachers lots of time. Classroom time and homework (grading and recording and printing) time.VocabularySpellingCity is a powerful tool for building literacy skills. It enables teachers to deliver their curriculum in a manner that allows for differentiation. Without our site, it’s nearly impossible for a single teacher to successfully teach three different sets of word lists (approaching-, at-, or above-grade level), as the major reading series (Treasures, Reading Street, Reading Wonders) prescribe. And while the idea of teaching with individualized lists, using the method employed by Words Their Way seems great, it requires a massive amount of work by a teacher every week.  But with VocabularySpellingCity’s Review Lists feature, creating individualized word lists for each student is simple. Students can then study the words that they need additional practice with through a rotation at a literacy center equipped with Chromebooks, PCs, iPads, or Android tablets.

Have anything you want to say to the Mayor?  Just click on comments and leave me a message.

The Mayor loves to visit schools and to hear directly from teachers and educators.

 

Film strip were a breakthrough technology!