Classrooms as adults know them no longer exist. When your parents were children the teacher used chalk on a board, and was lucky to have new textbooks. Today things have changed so drastically that adults can barely fathom what the kids are up to at school. Here are a few of the changes that have been made, for those parents who are curious.

Laptops and Overhead Projectors

Thanks to overhead projectors and laptops, students no longer have to clean the teacher’s chalkboard every period. Today’s kids don’t even know how miserable a chalkboard scratch used to be, or how messy and sticky white chalk powder feels.

While overhead projectors can be costly for classrooms, they do save teachers a lot of time drawing out pictures and examples. Even yesterday’s projectors required one drawing or written-out sample. Today’s instructors can simply hook-up to their laptop and download materials.

Virtual Experiments

In the past students would huddle together and share one example, whether it was a flyer or object. Gone are the days of craning your neck to attempt to read with three partners in class: today students are able to make their own photocopies, view one overhead projection, or pull out a laptop and download the file to desktop. Today’s children will never know the awkward discomfort of sharing one document with a group of classmates.

Science students no longer need to cut up frogs together, either: they can each have their own virtual dissection specimen. Technology allows us to take a single file online and split it into thousands of equal pieces like fish and wine.

Textbook Downloads

It used to be that a classroom had stacks of old, mismatched textbooks from different years and courses of study. Students were expected to somehow follow along in different editions with drastically dissimilar page arrangements. Today, every student can download the same textbook and follow along without the headaches of figuring out why a classmate is looking at the Berlin Wall while you are seeing the London Eye.

All of those old textbooks destroyed the environment on both ends–first the cut down the trees and deforested the spirit of the lands, and then they became heaps of garbage on the ravaged landscape. Today, technology allows students to read without destroying the planet.

Virtual Librarys

A few years ago students would trek to the library as much as twice a day for school books. These books were heavy, smelly, and it’s now known that they spread bed bugs. Bed bugs can cause people thousands to eradicate! Today, students can easily access the library without leaving home. Every book on the internet is available for free, or for a small fee. Students have even designed collaborative to share rare books online.

Thanks to mobile internet, young defenseless women no longer have to walk across dark quads at night, alone. Books are everywhere online. Overworked seniors can squeeze-in virtual library trips during five minute breaks at work, too.

E-Books

Student backpacks used to be so heavy that you could see the students hunching down under the weight. Today’s chiropractor are still benefiting from the back-breaking weight of school textbooks! However, today e-books are keeping people upright and happy: bad posture is a thing of the past. All it takes is a high speed internet connection and a password to attain your book and it can weigh what a tablet weighs.

Technology has changed the classroom as well as the way a student operates. Teachers no longer have to find all three copies of a rare book in their town in order to show it to the class. Students no longer have to squeeze-in library trips during busy days. Today, technology has filled in the gaps and made education easier than ever.