Technology has enveloped every aspect of our lives, oftentimes giving us advancements that help simplify or improve our lives. Technology has strongly made its way into the classroom as well, where now many schools are considered one-to-one institutions, meaning that each student has their own digital device to do work on. In some schools, it is a laptop and in others, it might be a tablet. But how are they being employed and what is the effect that they are having on today’s schooling?
Tablets and laptops are more for just checking BetUs for the latest sports betting odds or checking out how your March Madness bracket is faring. They are vital tools that are changing how work and learning are done inside the classroom. These devices in the classroom are definitely making changes and will continue to alter schooling into the future.
Let’s take a look at the effects of technology on schooling and what the future might hold.
Origins of Schooling
Schooling has been around for many, many centuries and has evolved with new educational advancements and also technological advancements at various intervals throughout history. But the origins of schooling as it currently operates and how we view it originated during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s and into the early 1800s.
Schools were designed to take care of children while their parents worked their factory shift. They were also designed to teach and ingrain the skills for those children to then graduate into working in the same factories that their parents worked in. They were designed around basic mathematics and simple rote memorization. Sound familiar?
Although schools have evolved and the rhetoric has changed in what schools are for, the roots and basic setup still exist even today.
Technology in the Classroom
Through grants and technological advancement, many schools have moved to provide a digital device in the form of a tablet or a laptop to all of their students with the goal to streamline education. These are starting to provide students with skills to use these devices to perform all of their work, which will prove to be useful when they enter the profession of their choice after schooling.
The creation of projects, presentations, and writing papers while also doing their daily tasks has become mainstreamed tasks done digitally instead of physically through creation. And this makes sense with where the business and working world currently is. But is that any different than how schooling was performed 150 years ago or has the medium in which learning takes place just changed?
Pros and Cons
On the positive side, students are learning skills that they can use later in their life. Work can be done quickly and efficiently with a decrease in paper waste and use inside of the school, saving countless time and money in producing copies upon copies of everything. Students are also given the opportunity to be creative and more organized than ever. They can instantly gain access to their work and be able to turn it in as well.
But it can come at a cost. These devices can also prove to be a distraction to students who are not motivated by schoolwork. They can now access a wealth of things outside of their educational studies that take them away from the focus of school. But is this a bad thing?
Changes to Schooling
Technology has opened the door to a gateway where schooling could and should ultimately shift their paradigm quickly. Especially at the secondary and post-secondary levels of schooling. Let students explore their world and let their interests take them where they need to. Technology and digital devices can open the world to new possibilities for students to learn new things outside of an outdated and traditional schooling system. Let them go to places like BetUs and explore how betting odds work.
Quit the rote memorization of facts that Siri can find for you on the internet in a matter of ten seconds. Instead, let them learn coding or how to build a house through research and a pure development of skills that are truly intrinsically motivated by the student. A new schooling model based around technology is exactly what we need and we need it quickly to allow the best schooling of our students’ lives to take place.
Featured image by Max Fischer from Pexels