According to Henneberg, “There are officially more mobile devices in the world than people” (para. 1). Technology, among the world, is exponentially increasing, while spreading school to school, innovating the classrooms and taking over dusty 600 page textbooks and other traditional classroom learning tools. But, as the world changes, daily, with these new inventions, educators are starting to wonder if this change is sufficient for making our children better students. While the growth and worldwide spread of technology has spread, so have the arguments and debates concerning whether technology has a reliable role in enhancing student learning. All education systems want students to be engaged in learning, achieving good results, and developing the skills they need for the workforce today and tomorrow. Without being universally uniform in the way they are carrying out information makes it hard to reach that goal. Some schools assert electronics are providing better tools for our students, but on the other hand, educators share specific concerns about the technology being brought into their classrooms and having profound negative impacts in the learning environment such as creating distractions, costly investments, and lack of creativity.
There are unbounded possibilities for learning when technology is integrated with students and educators. Teachers and educators say that technology provides “limitless learning” inside the classroom. Classrooms can now embed smartphones to create and record music, to develop e-books, to create apps, and organize group work. They can be used to “identify and critique a series of art images, and use Instagram to identify how young artists today apply Picasso’s techniques” (Orlando para. 4). Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds, students can use posts and blogs to enhance their learning as well. Textbooks give the same old information every year, and schools only replace these textbooks with new ones rarely. “The value is in getting real-time data” and having the capability to research the new world through the easy-access internet (Archibold para. 35). Today, anyone can use the internet to access libraries, encyclopedias, art galleries, news archives, and other information sources from anywhere in the world. This is a key advantage in the education field and the web is a treasure trove resource built for enhancing the process of knowledge and research. However, those who are against technology in the field of education within the classroom find that “student performance improves with the use of technology is misleading”, says Natasha Singer in an article found through the New York Times (para. 9).
Some believe computers might be killing more helpful paths of thought and discovery. With how easy it is to access to the internet , students “will only see as far as their “personal horizon”, with “no ken of what lies beyond” (Bruner para. 15). Students can breeze through classwork and meaningful assignments by searching the internet and not actually learning anything. They are cutting and pasting answers instead of finding them. Children have grown up having their questions instantly answered as long as they had access to the Internet. According to Henneberg, “Educators say that many children are not learning how to use physical maps to plot a location, use legends, or figure out scale”. This increase in technology has eliminated the process of critical thinking and has led students to let the internet do their brain’s work.
