Technology's Tutelage by Danielle

Technology's Tutelage by Danielle - January 2020 Scholarship Essay

Technology essentially controls our classroom life, at least in my experience. It has taken what was hours of writing flashcards to minutes creating a Quizlet. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, technology has improved my learning environment in a positive way. When I was in second grade, SmartBoards came into all of the classrooms in my school as well as many others. We went from trying to decipher the teachers' handwriting on the whiteboards and chalkboards as well as new information to having a new, interactive piece of technology that text and documents could be displayed on. We no longer had to focus on figuring out what the teacher tried to write and differentiating it between other eraser markings from words previously written on the board. It help many of my friends who had impaired vision be able to see more clear information. Technology opens up communication and collaboration between students. I have been able to work on many projects with other students through Google Docs. Google Docs allows many people at once to collaborate, working on the same document. With people now being able to work on papers or projects and add to it at the same time, the speed at which the project is complete is tremendously increased. Peer editing becomes a lot easier with technology. You can leave comments and highlight things without compromising the integrity of the draft. The exceptions I referred to earlier include the fact that if technology fails, the lesson plan for that day becomes completely skewed. I've had this happen to me a few times personally, where the internet was down or our site we use in my county, Frog, was not working and didn't allow us to download an assignment. But, with the help of other technology, the issue was always resolved. With the lack of internet, a printer was used by the teacher to give the assignment out. When Frog was down, we often resorted to the same solution used in the lack of internet issue. The issues from technology actually helped further our problem-solving skills. Technology allows me to access much more information than I ever could've asked for. Yes, we have a library, but that information is limited. Not being an extremely rich school, we aren't always getting new books with current information. Many of the sources the library has are dated, a good amount to when our parents and grandparents were in high school. The technology I have access to gives me current information. Some sites cannot be trusted, but there are ways to make sure you're getting correct information. Like checking that the source is a ".gov", ".edu", etc., or checking on multiple websites to make sure they agree. We have access to a lot more studying tools, like Kahoot and Quizlet. Before we often just had to write facts over and over again, create flashcards, or quiz our friends. Now, we can still resort to all of those methods, but we have other options. Sites like Kahoot and Quizlet quiz us, test our memory, and give us flashcards to use. Overall, technology has increased the speed of assignment completion, collaboration between my peers, access to current information, and has created better studying habits.