Technology has become very prevalent in classrooms, used for academic purposes and provides kids with quick and easy access to resources. Along with technology use in classrooms, it also brings many negatives that affect students’ education, mental and physical health. With this, is technology actually benefiting students or is it harming them more than helping?
Starting off with pros, I find that efficiency seems to be the biggest factor to using technology in classrooms. Technology allows teachers, students and parents to communicate from home, have access to coursework if absent from class and provide a way to view recent grades.
Along with efficiency, technology provides students a way to access varieties of resources. One example is when writing papers students can use the internet to research about the topic rather than having to search through an entire book, saving time. It also allows students to access textbooks online and find other resources to help them with any problem.
Using technology in classrooms has also proven to be extremely cost efficient for the student and the school. This prevents the student from having to buy many school supplies and textbooks, and also prevents the schools from having to buy those items.
Although there are many pros to technology use in classrooms, there are also many cons. Starting with distractions, students will often find themselves distracted on the piece of technology given to them for educational purposes. With fun games on computers and other distractions on their phones like text messages, it causes students to turn their attention away from the teacher or their assignment.
Next is cheating. Cheating is becoming a big problem in schools. Now with AI students can easily plagarize essays, homework and it can basically do anything you ask it to do. Also, from what I have seen, teachers have a big problem with students sharing their work online and copy and pasting work.
Also, the excessive use of technology leads to less human interaction which will eventually lead kids to be unable to communicate properly with other people in real life. Along with communication problems, it also causes lower cognitive abilities, academic performance and problems with developing language skills.
I think that technology use in classrooms is amazing and makes life so much easier for students. But with this, I think that we need to put limits on the use of it in school to regulate the use and prevent the negative effects. Schools are realizing these problems and are working to solve them every day by banning cellphone use and websites, but I do believe more needs to be done about the constant screen time.
