“Anything people can do to make teachers' lives a little bit easier turns out to be very powerful and very hard to walk away from because teachers are so overwhelmed, so overloaded, have too much to do all the time. And if you can just find a way to make a teacher's life a little easier, you can almost always worm your way into a classroom for better or for worse.”
Version History · October 2026
In an episode on the history of the overhead projector, the host explains how 3M got it into schools: by bundling transparencies with projectors, and textbooks and lesson plans made for them. He calls it one of the main lessons of a season spent on classroom technology.
Transcript
…and they've been a business thing. Now they start to really land in the classroom. At this point, for, as far as I can tell, a pretty long time, the chalkboard had been the main character in the classroom. Is that right, Antero? It was this was this was the thing that everybody used everywhere.
…orient people towards particular spaces and classrooms, right? Like there's a fixed nature of what the quote-unquote front of a classroom is because of the nature of a chalkboard and then the overhead projector, which gave us much more flexibility than other kinds of devices that would come later.
…were also very good at this argument is that. What 3M started doing was bundling transparencies with both projectors so that you could sort of easily start using them and with textbooks. So they would ship textbooks and sort of lesson plans that were made to go on the overhead projector. And I think one of my great learnings from all of the research for this season of Version History has been anything people can do to make teachers' lives a little bit easier turns out to be very powerful and very hard to walk away from because teachers are so overwhelmed, so overloaded, have too much to do all the time. And if you can just find a way to make a teacher's life a little easier, you can almost always worm your way into a classroom for better or for worse. And there are some of both of those in these episodes. But that just seems to be part of this. And 3M understood that and was like, well, we're going to make one little part of your teaching life easier. And it really seemed to help. As all of this is happening, we need to shout out one other very important and very influential use for overhead projectors, which was bowling alleys. There was…
I just, I never believed there was anything before the TV. The TV was there for all of history. So
there was. Fun fact. And it was called the Telescore. And basically, the way it worked is it was this large desk, and the desk was also an overhead projector. And you would sit down and you would program your scores. It would then project all the way down the lane, two lanes at a time, the names…
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