The day Netscape 1.0 came out, the teacher had us all download it from a few of CDs passed around had burned after downloading it on the class modem. The classroom was networked (coax) and figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to work over the next few weeks to share the network with the computer with the modem. By 1996 we had a frame relay connection.
There was no curriculum other than what these two teachers could envision and sell to the achool board. Pretty thankful for that.
I graduated college in 2012 and I learned what css was and why it was better. I took an intro to java class. Learned some stuff volunteering for NPOs doing website work. When I graduated I knew I wanted to do something in IT but not program. Now I am a software dev.
Turns out its easy to get a job and teach yourself how to code when nobody understands what coding is.
In 2015 my teenager will start High School in a small, rural, school district and each student has a Chromebook. No, I don't know what they will be used for besides googling information, but times are changing.
I emphasized small and rural for a reason.
It's really amazing stuff. I wish these sort of programs existed in the US back when I was in elementary school... back then, we were lucky if we got 30 minutes a week to play with Claris Works in the school's only computer lab.
- are teachers able to choose, remix, adapt, or make new "computational" instructional materials like they are able to do with conventional instructional materials? (Stencilling and xeroxing for the win :-)
- are computers only used as supporting tools (i.e., typewriter, encyclopedia, drawing board, ...) or is computational thinking integral part of the curriculum?
- is there software like programming tools, CAS (such as maxima, or matlab, or mathematica), CAD, and other configurable and programmable professional tools available? (and will they be used beyond a module of two weeks here or there?)
- has the (core) curriculum changed at al or are we still teaching topics like it is 1982? Computer technology makes it possible for students to tackle complex authentic problems instead of "school problems" (Death to linearity! Away with nice round numbers!)
We, as a society, should have started integrating computational thinking (Wing, 2006) as a core competency in the k-12 curriculum from the late 1980s onwards. We didn't.
anecdote
In 1991, I was in 5th grade, I saw the first computer enter the classroom in my primary school. It wasn't used but for some remedial mathematics training for a students or two and I believe the teacher did a computer course with it.
In 2010 I became a high school computer science teacher. There were three computer rooms (about 30 computers each) for the whole school (of about 1500 students) running windows XP + IE 6. Besides my class, the computer rooms were mostly used for making reports and "searching for information". Some departments did have specialized software installed (most of which came with the text books), but used it sparingly at best. On top of that, these software was mostly simple, inflexible, mostly non-interactive, non-collaborative, and "pre-fab" instructional materials. Often this software was not much more than a "digitized" version of parts of the text book with some animations, games, and procedural trainers mixed in.