Technology in the Classroom

As we have grown up, many of us have seen technology slowly becoming more and more predominate in the classroom. Through out the years in which we have been in school we have seen the classrooms go from having old fashioned black boards to the cool new white boards and now we have SMART BOARDS. Honestly even what we are writing on is high tech. Although the fact that we have all this technology is awesome, is it coming at a price and how can we use the technology in moderations and to advantages in the classroom. These are all things I am going to discuss.

From the Dumbest Generation website I read the article Is Stupid Making us Google?. This article really caught my attention. I remember in high school we would be writing a research paper and so many of my peers would just go to Google, type in their topic and call it a day. That was their research. No scholarly articles, no books, NOTHING. How can us as a generation call research going to Google and typing in a topic. Not only is Google creating a short cut to research it is causing students and people in general to have only online reading. James Bowmen says, “It is these poor cultural orphans, for whom “information retrieval” online is the only kind of reading they know”. It is horrible to think that the only reason people are reading is to retrieve information or to check our facebook. While we are having much more exposure to the written word, it saddens me to think that it is in bad grammar and improper English. While this Googling (yes it is a verb now) is giving a shortcut, it is also creating ignorance among the younger generations. As the generations get younger and younger they know less and less about what is going on in the world.

Now that I have completely bashed technology, now I am going to discuss how there are some positives. Incorporating technology in your classroom will have some benefits. When you look at the technology we now have for students with disabilities, it is amazing the progress we have made. Students being able to use computers with merely their eyes. It is incredible. The article Moving my English Class to the Computer Lab Tracy J. Tarasiuk talks about how she has a student Robert, who is not doing well on his exams and in his reading, but loves to YouTube. Students like Robert are going to be what the majority of us, as future teachers of English have in our classroom. We are going to have to adapt our lesson plans, with technology to keep these students attention. I worked with this one little boy Xavier who hated sitting in the classroom. He had a teacher who would just give him worksheet after worksheet, and he would just look at me and say “Miss Kelly this is stupid”. Xavier would have benefited from doing activities on the computer or at a listening station, to keep his interest. Technology does and will always serve a purpose in our classrooms; it is really just a matter of how we use it and how often we use it. Like everything life is good with moderation.