After 27 years at Benton Community, I’ve decided to hang up my network cables and call it a career. As technology coordinator during that time, I have witnessed an incredible amount of change and innovation. I thought it would be interesting to do sort of a “then vs. now” article comparing the technology I was dealing with when I started at Benton with some of the things happening in the tech realm today.
I guess I’ll start with the job description. Benton’s 2025 technology coordinator job description is two pages long. When I asked for a job description in 1998, I was simply told, “If you can plug it in, you’re responsible for it.” When I started, we had a computer lab of PS-100 Gateway computers that teachers could reserve. Now, every student at the high school is assigned a Chromebook. We currently use social media to promote events and our school. Email was the new thing my rookie year. Presently, we can go online and view live high school sporting events. Back in the day, we used Netscape to get online, and bandwidth was so limited that users couldn’t watch anything live. DVDs vs. streaming, overhead projectors vs. Promethean panels, bag phones vs. cell phones… the list goes on.
Speaking of cell phones… One picture taken with a modern cell phone could not fit on the standard storage device of ’98—the floppy disk. The floppy disk holds 1.44 MB (megabytes) of data, and today’s pictures run at least three times larger than that. In fact, it would take 111,111 floppy disks to equal the storage capacity of one 16GB (gigabytes) thumb drive today.
That’s a lot of change, and that doesn’t even include the emergence of AI. During this period of unprecedented change, our teachers have had to regularly adjust their teaching methods and how they communicate with students and parents. Some have embraced these changes, while a few went kicking and screaming into the world of technological innovation. But regardless of how they got there, I’ve been constantly impressed by their ability to transform how they deliver classroom content and reach students. I see no reason why that won’t continue to be the case in the future.
Picture shows a typical computer set up with printer in the year 1998.