PHILIPPINE NORMAL UNIVERSITY

The National center for Teacher Education

Taft Avenue, Manila

EVOLUTION OF
EDUCATIONAL
TECHNOLOGY

Presented by:
AGUNOD, ANGELICA D.
III-4 Bachelor of Filipino Education

Submitted to:
Prof. Rowena Sabate
Education Technology (PROFED06)
OBJECTIVES
 At the end of the discussion, students will be able to:
 trace the development of education under the different era and the corresponding
educational technology used
 show value towards different technological inventions in the field of education
and;
 project the future of education technology.

INTRODUCTION
“Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life, it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is
the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.”
~Freeman Dyson
In the world that we currently live in, technology is a very vital factor. With each passing
day a new software or gadget is being brought into the market that serves to improve our lives in
one way or another and make it much easier and also to advance an already existing software or
gadget. However, it is important to note that despite the fact that technology plays a big role in
making our lives easier, it is not the only role it has.
Technology is increasingly growing its importance in the education sector. The more
technology advances, the more benefits it provides for students at every education level.
TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION
Technology that is made use of in the classroom is very beneficial in helping the students
understand and absorb what they are being taught. For instance, since there are a number of
students who are visual learners, projection screens connected to computers could be put in
classrooms to let the students see their notes as opposed to simply sitting down and listening to
the instructor teach.
There is a number of very good software that can be used to supplement the class
curriculum. The programs make available to students quizzes, tests, activities and study
questions that could help the students continue with the learning process when they are out of the
classroom.
Today, technology has been incorporated into a good number of curriculum even those
that do not belong to the technology and computer classes. Students make use of computers to
come up with presentations and also make use of the internet to carry out research on a variety of
topics for their essays and papers.
Students also get to know how to use the technology available in the world today through
the tech and computer classes. This gives the guarantee that following their graduation, the
students will not have any difficulties with using technology when they are out there in the work

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place, which might serve to make them more competitive compared to an individual who has no
access to a certain software or technology in school.
With the continuing advances in the technological world, students are getting improved
access to such educational opportunities. Every time something ‘better’ and ‘new’ is brought into
the market, the price of the existing technology is decreased which makes it much more
accessible in the educational setting even to those schools that might not have a lot of financial
resources available to them.
Technology has greatly grown to the point that it is also available today to assist those
kids who are yet to begin school. There are a number of educational systems and video games for
the small children that assist them in getting ready for school and in a number of situations also
give them a head start on their education.
There are a number of people who are of the opinion that technology ‘spoils’ children.
For instance, as opposed to sitting down and getting to know how to count, they will opt to get a
calculator. Despite the fact that there are people who are making these arguments, technology
still remains to be a very vital component of the society we live in today. By introducing it into
our schools and classrooms, we will ensure that the students are equipped with much better tools
and knowledge to make their transition from school to the work place a very easy one. We need
to face the truth, technology is the ‘in thing’ in the world today and it has become necessary in
each and every aspect of our lives and education has without doubt not been left behind. It is
very useful in providing more knowledge to our students and also on making them competitive
in the job market.

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CONTENT
EVOLUTION OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
What is Education Technology?
 Education Technology (also known as “EdTech”) refers to an area of technology devoted
to the development and application of tools (including software, hardware, and processes)
intended to promote education.
 Put another way, “EdTech is a study and ethical practice for facilitating learning and
improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological
processes and resources.”
Evolution of Ed Tech
 ABACUS (300 BC)
Abacus is a Latin word that has its origins in the Greek words abax or abakon
(meaning "table" or "tablet") which in turn, possibly originated from the Semitic word
abq, meaning "sand". The abacus is one of many types of counting devices which are
used to count large numbers.
Why does the abacus exist?
It is difficult to imagine counting without numbers, but there was a time when
written numbers did not exist. The earliest counting device was the human hand and
its fingers, capable of counting up to 10 things; toes were also used to count in
tropical cultures. Then, as even larger quantities (greater than ten fingers and toes
could represent) were counted, various natural items like pebbles, sea shells and twigs
were used to help keep count.
Merchants who traded goods needed a way to keep count (inventory) of the goods
they bought and sold. Various portable counting devices were invented to keep tallies.
The abacus is one of many counting devices invented to help count large numbers.
When the Hindu-Arabic number system came into use, abaci were adapted to use
place-value counting.
Abaci evolved into electro-mechanical calculators, pocket slide-rules, electronic
calculators and now abstract representations of calculators or simulations on
smartphones.

What is the difference between a counting board and an abacus?

It is important to distinguish the early abacuses (or abaci) known as counting
boards from the modern abaci. The counting board is a piece of wood, stone or metal
with carved grooves or painted lines between which beads, pebbles or metal discs
were moved. The abacus is a device, usually of wood (romans made them out of

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 metal and they are made of plastic in modern times), having a frame that holds rods
with freely-sliding beads mounted on them.
Both the abacus and the counting board are mechanical aids used for counting;
they are not calculators in the sense we use the word today. The person operating the
abacus performs calculations in their head and uses the abacus as a physical aid to
keep track of the sums, the carrys, etc.
What did the first counting board look like?
The earliest counting boards are forever lost because they were constructed of
perishable materials like wood. Educated guesses can be made about the construction
of counting boards based on early writings of Plutarch and others.
Used in outdoor markets of those times, the simplest counting board involved
drawing lines in the sand with ones fingers or with a stylus, and placing pebbles
between those lines as place-holders representing numbers (the spaces between the
lines would represent the units 10s, 100s, etc.); two pebbles inthe 10s column would
indicate 20. Affluent merchants could afford small wooden tables having raised
borders that were filled with sand (usually coloured blue or green). A benefit of these
counting boards on tables, was that they could be moved without disturbing the
calculation— the table could be picked up and carried indoors.
With the need for portable devices, wooden boards with grooves carved into the
surface were then created and wooden markers (small discs) were used as place-
holders. The wooden boards then gave way to even more more durable materials like
marble and metal (bronze) used with stone or metal markers.

 SALAMIS TABLET (400 BC)

The earliest archaeological evidence for the use of the Greek abacus dates to the
5th century BC. The Greek abacus was a table of wood or marble, pre-set with small
counters in wood or metal for mathematical calculations. This Greek abacus saw use in
Achaemenid Persia, the Etruscan civilization, Ancient Rome and, until the French
Revolution, the Western Christian world.
A tablet found on the Greek island Salamis in 1846 AD (the Salamis Tablet ),
dates back to 300 BC, making it the oldest counting board discovered so far. It is a slab of
white marble 149 cm (59 in) long,75 cm (30 in) wide, and 4.5 cm (2 in) thick, on which
are five groups of markings.
In the center of the tablet is a set of five parallel lines equally divided by a vertical
line, capped with a semicircle at the intersection of the bottom-most horizontal line and
the single vertical line.Below these lines is a wide space with a horizontal crack dividing
it. Below this crack is another group of eleven parallel lines, again divided into two
sections by a line perpendicular to them, but with the semicircle at the top of the

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 intersection; the third, sixth and ninth of these lines are marked with across where they
intersect with the vertical line.
 STONEHENGE (2,300 BC)
Stonehenge is a massive stone monument located on a chalky plain north of the
modern-day city of Salisbury, England. Research shows that the site has continuously
evolved over a period of about 10,000 years. The structure that we call "Stonehenge" was
built between roughly 5,000 and 4,000 years ago and was one part of a larger sacred
landscape that included a massive stone monument that was 15 times the size of
Stonehenge.
The biggest of Stonehenge's stones, known as sarsens, are up to 30 feet (9 meters)
tall and weigh 25 tons (22.6 metric tons) on average. It is widely believed that they were
brought from Marlborough Downs, a distance of 20 miles (32 kilometers) to the north.
Smaller stones, referred to as "bluestones" (they have a bluish tinge when wet or
freshly broken), weigh up to 4 tons and come from several different sites in western
Wales, having been transported as far as 140 miles (225 km). It's unknown how people in
antiquity moved them that far. Recent experiments show that it is possible for a one-ton
stone to be moved by a dozen people on a wooden trackway, but whether this technique
was actually used by the ancient builders is uncertain.

 LEONARDO DA VINCI CALCULATOR (1452)

The term “Renaissance Man” refers to a person who has excelled at several
disciplines completely different from one another: painting, say, and mechanical
engineering. That was what Leonardo da Vinci, who actually lived during the
Renaissance period, accomplished. Best known today for his paintings of The Last
Supper and the Mona Lisa, he was also a prolific inventor, creating hundreds of sketches
of machines that couldn’t be built for centuries. He could even be said to have invented
the world’s first calculator.
On this day, February 13, in 1967, American researchers working in the National
Library of Spain in Madrid happened upon two previously unknown sketches of da Vinci.
Curious to see what value the two discoveries had, they enlisted the help of IBM to build
the complicated device on the plans. What came back amazed everybody.
The device had thirteen interlocking wheels, each with ten faces numbered
sequentially from 0 to 9. After the first wheel reached 9, the second wheel would engage,
and so on. It was the world’s first adding macine — or a sketch of one anyway. No
machines with that many moving parts could have operated in da Vinci’s time due to
friction. But for a man who invented the helicopter, practicality was not an obstacle.
 GUTTENBURG PRINTING PRESS (1440)
Printing press, machine by which text and images are transferred to paper or other
media by means of ink. Although movable type, as well as paper, first appeared in China,
it was in Europe that printing first became mechanized. The earliest mention of a printing
press is in a lawsuit in Strasbourg in 1439 revealing construction of a press for Johannes
Gutenberg and his associates.

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 The invention of the printing press itself obviously owed much to the medieval
paper press, in turn modeled after the ancient wine-and-olive press of the Mediterranean
area. A long handle was used to turn a heavy wooden screw, exerting downward pressure
against the paper, which was laid over the type mounted on a wooden platen. In its
essentials, the wooden press reigned supreme for more than 300 years, with a hardly
varying rate of 250 sheets per hour printed on one side.
Metal presses began to appear late in the 18th century, at about which time the
advantages of the cylinder were first perceived and the application of steam power was
considered. By the mid-19th century, Richard M. Hoe of New York had perfected a
power-driven cylinder press in which a large central cylinder carrying the type
successively printed on the paper of four impression cylinders, producing 8,000 sheets an
hour in 2,000 revolutions. The rotary press came to dominate the high-speed newspaper
field, but the flatbed press, having a flat bed to hold the type and either a reciprocating
platen or a cylinder to hold the paper, continued to be used for job printing.
A significant innovation of the late 19th century was the offset press, in which the
printing (blanket) cylinder runs continuously in one direction while paper is impressed
against it by an impression cylinder. Offset printing is especially valuable for colour
printing, because an offset press can print multiple colours in one run. Offset
lithography—used for books, newspapers, magazines, business forms, and direct mail—
continued to be the most widely used printing method at the start of the 21st century,
though it was challenged by ink-jet, laser, and other printing methods.
Apart from the introduction of electric power, advances in press design between
1900 and the 1950s consisted of a great number of relatively minor mechanical
modifications designed to improve the speed of the operation. Among these changes were
better paper feed, improvements in plates and paper, automatic paper reels, and
photoelectric control of colour register. The introduction of computers in the 1950s
revolutionized printing composition, with more and more steps in the print process being
replaced by digital data. At the end of the 20th century, a new electronic printing method,
print-on-demand, began to compete with offset printing, though it—and printing
generally—came under increasing pressure in developed countries as publishers,
newspapers, and others turned to online means of distributing what they had previously
printed on paper.
 NAPIER’S BONES (1617)
Napier's bones, also called Napier's rods, are numbered rods which can be used to
perform multiplication of any number by a number 2-9. By placing "bones"
corresponding to the multiplier on the left side and the bones corresponding to the digits
of the multiplicand next to it to the right, and product can be read off simply by adding
pairs of numbers (with appropriate carries as needed) in the row determined by the
multiplier. This process was published by Napier in 1617 an a book titled Rabdologia, so
the process is also called rabdology.
There are ten bones corresponding to the digits 0-9, and a special eleventh bone
that is used the represent the multiplier. The multiplier bone is simply a list of the digits
1-9 arranged vertically downward. The remainder of the bones each have a digit written

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 in the top square, with the multiplication table for that digits written downward, with the
digits split by a diagonal line going from the lower left to the upper right. In practice,
multiple sets of bones were needed for multiplication of numbers containing repeated
digits.

Napier’s Bones Computation

To multiply two numbers, arrange the bones as described above. The above
illustration shows this process for 7×4896. The computation proceeds from right to left,
starting with the rightmost bone in the row determined by the multiplier. In this case, the
last digit in the 7s row of the 6-bone is 2, so write down 2. Now add the two adjacent
numbers in the same row to the left (i.e., the ones in the parallelogram) to obtain 3+4=7,
which is the next digit, so we now have 72. The next sum is 6+6=12, so write down the 2
two obtain 272 and carry the 1. Proceeding to the next digit, it is 8+5+=14 (because of the
carry), so write down the 4 to obtain 4272 and carry the 1. The leftmost digit is then
2+1=3 (from the carry), giving the final answer 7×4896=34272.
While Napier's bones require manual accounting for carries, an ingenious
extension known as Genaille rods allows products to simply be read off directly, without
the need for carries or even addition of pairs of adjacent digits.
 SLIDE RULE (1654)
Slide rule, a device consisting of graduated scales capable of relative movement,
by means of which simple calculations may be carried out mechanically. Typical slide
rules contain scales for multiplying, dividing, and extracting square roots, and some also
contain scales for calculating trigonometric functions and logarithms. The slide rule
remained an essential tool in science and engineering and was widely used in business
and industry until it was superseded by the portable electronic calculator late in the 20th
century.

The logarithmic slide rule is a compact device for rapidly performing calculations
with limited accuracy. The invention of logarithms in 1614 by the Scottish mathematician
John Napier and the computation and publication of tables of logarithms made it possible
to effect multiplication and division by the simpler operations of addition and subtraction.
Napier’s early conception of the importance of simplifying mathematical calculations
resulted in his invention of logarithms, and this invention made possible the slide rule.
The English mathematician and inventor Edmund Gunter (1581–1626) devised
the earliest known logarithmic rule, known as Gunter’s scale or the gunter, which aided
seamen with nautical calculations. In 1632 another English mathematician, William
Oughtred, designed the first adjustable logarithmic rule; as shown in the photograph, it
was circular. Oughtred also designed the first linear slide rule, although the familiar inner
sliding rule was invented by the English instrument-maker Robert Bissaker in 1654. The
usefulness of the slide rule for rapid calculation was recognized, especially in England,
during the 18th century, and the instrument was made in considerable numbers, with
slight modifications.

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 Improvements in the direction of increased accuracy were initiated by Matthew
Boulton and James Watt from about 1779 in connection with calculations in the design of
steam engines at their works at Birmingham, England. In 1814 the English physician
Peter Roget (of Roget’s Thesaurus) invented his “log-log” slide rule for calculating
powers and roots of numbers. The fixed scale, instead of being divided logarithmically, is
divided into lengths that are proportional to the logarithm of the logarithm of the numbers
indicated on the scale; the sliding scale is divided logarithmically.
Amédée Mannheim, an officer of the French artillery, invented in 1859 what may
be considered the first of the modern slide rules. This rule had scales on one face only.
The Mannheim rule, which also brought into general use a cursor, or indicator, was much
used in France, and after about 1880 it was imported in large numbers into other
countries.
Most important of later improvements was the arrangement of the scales,
trigonometric and log-log, so that they operate together while maintaining a consistent
relationship to the basic scales. This arrangement gave added speed and flexibility to the
solving of many problems—simple and complex alike—because it produced solutions by
continuous operation instead of requiring the user to combine intermediate readings.
 CHALKBOARD (1801)
The chalkboard is widely believed to have been invented by a Scottish teacher
James Pillans, in the nineteenth-century (About Blackboards, para. 7). Mr. Pillans
“supposedly hung his students’ slates together on the wall, making a large ‘slate board’ to
write up his geography lessons where the whole class could see them at once” (Wylie,
2012, pp. 259-260). The first documented case of the chalkboard however is found in
America in 1801. Mr. George Baron is credited as being the first teacher to make use of a
large black chalkboard to assist him with his instruction at West Point Military Academy
(About Blackboards, para. 8). Regardless of where it was invented, either in the United
Kingdom or in the United States of America, the fact remains that the chalkboard was
created by teachers to assist with teaching, and is an important educational technology.

CONCLUSION
As we enter the stage of globalization, technology is a good tool for a quality education.
Tracing back the history of Educational Technology, we witnessed how technology played a
vital role in shaping the current image of education. Several changes in the whole system of our
society also implies changes in the demands in the field of education. Since we are now in the 4th
Industrial Revolution where technological inventions are on its way in improving people’s lives,
we cannot get rid of its influence in many aspects especially on education. Technology has the
power to bring the process of teaching and learning into a level where teachers and students are
not just consumers, but rather producers of knowledge. Through the use of technology, we are
able to explore and create things around us which contributes to the continuous cultivation of
knowledge which eventually can lead us not just to personal growth but in the larger sense,

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societal development. At the end of the day, I will always believe that there is no permanent
thing in this world but change. Education changes so as technology. The connection that lies
between education and technology never stops in a certain period. Learning is a continuous
process for people to survive the challenges of life, and technology could help us on this. Life is
a race, and in order to win, one must learn to embrace change.

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REFERENCES
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 The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. (2018, January 11). Slide rule. Retrieved
January 14, 2018, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/slide-rule
 Napier's Bones. (n.d.). Retrieved January 14, 2018, from
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NapiersBones.html
 The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. (2017, April 07). Printing press. Retrieved
January 14, 2018, from https://www.britannica.com/technology/printing-press
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 Jarus, O. (2017, August 18). Stonehenge: Facts & Theories About Mysterious
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stonehenge-facts.html
 Abacus History. (n.d.). Retrieved January 14, 2018, from https://www.abacus-
maths.com/greek-abacus.html
 (n.d.). Retrieved January 14, 2018, from
https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/history.html
 Lazaro, H. (2017, May 22). What Is Educational Technology and Why Should It Matter
to You? Retrieved January 14, 2018, from https://generalassemb.ly/blog/what-is-edtech/
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technology-in-education

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