Year 7 Technology Generational Interviews 2024

We began the Year 7 Technology course this year with an introduction activity asking our students to interview a family or friend of another generation about their experiences with technology during high school.

Here is a snippet of the wonderful narratives and articles the students produced.

Dial up Phones

Lisa Taylor would come home from school and call her friends every day. The difference between my life and hers is that she had to remember all her friends phone numbers so she could dial them.
Perdita Taylor

My dad Craig told me the phone was in the middle of the corridor, it allowed little to no privacy. It also meant that the occasional awkward moment couldn’t be avoided, if you were to dial a friend, their parent would be the one to pick up, as it was a family line.
Ariel Wilson

In the classroom

My mum Ashlee Hamlin shared with me details of her school life. In most classes there was an overhead projector used for information slides. They also used wheel-in television for educational purposes.
Indigo Hasemer 

Computers and TVs were not used in the classroom when Brian McMaster went to school, and the only piece of Technology he used in the classroom was a slide ruler, for maths.
Clementine Reuss

For this project I interviewed my 81-year-old Grandma, who lives in Adelaide. When she was my age, instead of having TVs people used a thing called a slide projector, which was a camera film being projected on the wall by a 16mm projector.
Lily Withers

Researching

The word microfiche threw me! What was a microfiche? I did some research (using technology) and discovered it’s a piece of film with micro photos of newspapers, catalogues, and documents so small you can’t read them. You put the microfilms into a machine that magnifies them onto a screen. Nowadays all this information would just be online!
Anja Baker

There were no computers at school for my parents Joyce and Kevin, “all we used were movie projectors”. When researching information for subjects such as Science, History, Geography, they would use books and encyclopedias.
Madison Coutts

My dad Richard went to the library and used microfilm and books. He used a Macintosh (Apple) computer, watched things on the TV and the teachers used a projector.
Saskia Pym

My mum did not grow up with her own computer. She would have a computer room where only two computers would be and you would have to share them with the whole school…..
Claudia Rennie-Meyenn

Other Technologies

My mum Nikoll used typewriters and a tape recorder in her final years to record and share experiences.
Posie Nobay

When saving files, my father used what’s called a floppy disk which was about the size of an envelope.
Sara Malavich

Beatrice brought in a cassette from the 1980’s with an interview of her Great Grandmother by her Mum.

It was very exciting to hear as I don’t think any of us had heard a cassette before, my mum sounded so cute, it was cool to hear my great grandmothers voice, she sounded so posh and old fashioned.
Beatrice Inglis

TAS Department