Technology in the School System

Today I want to talk about education in the digital age and how it is going to be in the future.  My generation is the first generation to really be learning through technology.  When I was younger smartboards had just started to come out and they were being installed in schools.  I remember how excited my classmates and I were when we started using smartboards and everyone wanted to participate because we would get to go up to the board and write things.  That feeling of excitement to learn and participate in the class activities is how every student should feel about education.  I believe that technology really gives that to us because we are able to have more resources available to us.

Technology in the school system has come a long way but it still has a very long way to go.  At my school we have an ipad air for every student to use but many of the teachers prefer not to use them because they don't think that the ipads are helpful to the class.  The teachers have caught students playing games on the ipads and they take them away from students because they don't want us to be distracted.  It causes the teachers to not ever use the ipad in class and the whole class has to suffer the consequences of not being able to use their ipad because of the students who do play games.  My school has even resulted in taking away the app store from everyone's ipad and I really believe that this was the wrong approach because there is always going to be someone to figure out how to download apps onto their ipad and then everyone has them.  If schools are going to have technology available to students then they should give us full access to our resources because if they don't we are still restsricted to the apps they have us and it limits are creativity.  There are thousands of apps available on the app store and we have access to less than 200 apps.

  In the future, students will be able to do amazing things with the new technology that will be available for them to use but for right now I don't think technology in schools is being used to the best of it's ability.  As of right now many of the teachers are not used to the technology, schools are not willing to give the students full access to the ipads, and many schools don't even have the technology available to them.  I would prefer to either have all of our assignments on the ipad or have them all on paper.  To ask students to use the ipad for some classes and then never use it for other classes is too much in my  opinion. One of the reasons we started using ipads was because we wanted to limit the number of books students have to carry and the school also wanted to  limit the amount of bookwork we do. I still carry the same amount of books and binders in my backpack and in my opinion the amount of bookwork hasn't changed.  Hopefully technology will be better used in school systems after a few years have passed and schools know how to use it well.