For the majority of my education up until college, I was a pupil of the Seattle Public School District. Before I moved to Seattle, I attended Forest Glen elementary in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and before that, Wake Field Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina. Of all the preschools and elementary schools that I attended, I didn’t see much technology in the classroom until I moved to Seattle. We had AV carts and overhead projectors in all my classes prior to moving to Seattle. However, I went to the majority of elementary school in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. I never formally learned to type and everything I did know came from this software my grandma bought me. I would put in a disk for this program, into the actual computer, which was located under the monitor. The program was designed as a game, but was really supposed to teach you to type. I hated it, but my mom gave me extra dessert when I spent time on it. In addition to that game, I also learned how to navigate the internet and use internet browsers during the extensive time I spent online playing “dress-up” and “make-over” games on Barbie’s website.
I distinctly remember the first time I saw a document camera. I was sitting in the first day of school assembly at my new elementary school and one of the teachers was reading a story to the entire school. She set up the media console so that we could see the pictures in the storybook, and when she went to turn the page, much to my amazement, we could see her fingers in full color turning the page of an actual book. I turned to the person next to me and loudly exclaimed, “It’s a movie!” The student next to me hushed me and paid little attention to my astonishment. As I listened to the rest of the story, my fifth-grade brain came to realize that the teacher had a camera that was set up to display in real-time what it was seeing.
That day turned out to be a very defining day in the development of my fascination with electronic media. I was fascinated with the technology that all the classrooms in my new school had and all that they could do. My teacher had a Smart Board in her classroom, a microphone, and tons of other gadgets. For the rest of my education, all my teachers had varying levels of new technology. The fact that from fifth-grade on, I never had a class room without degree of new technology speaks to how education is changing.
When I came home after school one day, probably 6th grade, to find that my parents had purchased a shiny, brand new, Apple desktop computer, that was about as thin and sleek as they come, I was ecstatic. My sister couldn’t figure out why I was excited, but I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and all the magical things this piece of metal could do. The time I spent on this computer, playing with all the apps and features, taught me a lot about Macintosh products, and considering that most all digital devices I own now are Apple, the things I learned while using that first mac set me up for success and made it easy for me to learn.
In high school, my friends always came to me when they were having technical issues, whether it be to find a specific setting on their or to figure out why the sound on their PowerPoint wasn’t working. Most of the time I could figure out the problem, simply due to the patterns and trends that I, like others, understand about technology. I would also Photoshop out beer cans from photos and things of the sort so my friends could post the pictures on their social media pages. My senior year of high school is when we consciously realized that I could figure these things out faster than some of my friends. They began calling me TechSavvy Abby, and I liked it.
At the end of my senior year, my dad and I went to the Apple store and picked out a new laptop for me as my graduation gift. Somehow I was able to finesse a Macbook Pro with Retina Display out of him and in the car ride home I couldn’t have had a bigger smile on my face. The first thing I did was download my younger sisters unused Photoshop 13 onto my laptop, and started learning to use it. Over the summer, I worked for two different local small businesses and did graphic design and things for them. I was so happy to use my new laptop for these purposes.
Annotations:
A document camera displays what is underneath the camera onto the screen in the front of the classroom, this picture shows the reader what type of device I was so astounded by. source
The Photobooth icon is relevant to this story because my sister and I used that application together on our family's new computer. My sister and I took lots of goofy photos together on the new computer. source
The photo of the woman with the iPad works in that moment because I am talking about how my friends would come to me for tech help and how I consider myself to be very fluent in digital literacy. I can use most all software and devices with basically no practice. source
The photo of three different devices is relevant because in high school my friends would make fun of me for using my Macbook, iPhone and iPad all at the same time. source