Be Careful, Technology

Texting in Class Earns an A From Teachers

        This article addressed a very interesting topic in education today. The general subject of the article was how and if using technology in education can really be beneficial for our students.  My observation over the past two years working with high school students is that everyone has a cell phone. I mean everyone. I worked in a title one school with some of the least affluent students in the school. Every single one of them had a cell phone. So the argument that not everyone has access to technology is somehwat of a mute point to me. The article started out with an example of a teacher encouraging her students to bring their electronic devices to class and having them use them to communicate with the rest of the class. The teacher set it up in a way that she posed a question and then had her students respond with their devices. Their responses then showed up on the interactive whiteboard in front of her class. Wow. Think about the possibilities, the way that changes the way students learn and interact with each other and even the teachers. Is everything about this good? I don’t necessarily think so. I understand with a situation like the one presented at the beginning of the article, each and every student’s response gets to be seen by everyone else, meaning everyone had an input on the question at hand. That definitely doesn’t get to happen when a question is posed in class and the instructor chooses one of the few volunteers to answer the question. But the negatives are apparent too. Where is the true face to face communication? Does this allow students to hide behind their devices? If the entire class has an electronic device out how much instruction time is going to waste when students aren’t paying complete attention to the teacher? Even if there was a great management system for appropriate times to be using devices, how much learning time gets lost in the transition? This article was very positive and excited about the use and direction of technology in the classroom, and so am I, don’t get me wrong. It is easy to see that our current generation of students is fairly reliant on technology and that the future of education may be too. I just hope that there can be some efficient way to incorporate and manage the use of technology in the classrooms without losing too much time or focus on the lessons at hand.