I would like to share a story I prepared yesterday. I used to buy term papers online until I realised that I am capable of writing on my own. Proceed to read my article.
When I was a kid, we had to walk to school uphill. Of course, the way home was downhill, but if I wanted to listen to music I had to use a Walkman, because the portable CD player didn’t have electronic skip protection. And if we wanted to record footage, well, we needed a whole separate device called a video camera. Times have changed. Children these days may still have to commute the same respective distances to reach their schools, but I’m sure these walks are much more enjoyable when you carry a device in your pocket that has full internet access, instant messaging, voice communication, the ability to record footage, more games than a video arcade, and an array of applications limited only by the bounds of human ingenuity. Yes, the children of today have smart phones, and the world shaking and changing effects of this cause have only begun to be examined. This article will explain some of the ways these devices change the classroom environment.
1.Unrestricted Access to the Internet: Controlling student internet browsing within a school used to be as easy as setting up a firewall. The faculty or designated network gatekeeper would maintain a list of websites that were blocked. If students spent too much time watching footage at the NBA website or school fights on YouTube, personal could simply make the decision to restrict or cutoff access to those sites. Things have changed. Students with a smart phone have full access to the internet, and there’s little to nothing that school officials can do to control their browsing.
2.Silent Communication: Now that students have cell phones, they can silently communicate right beneath or around their teacher’s attention. This leads to a multitude of problems. It is easier for students to cheat, be distracted, or recruit outside help in the event of a fight. What may have been a “fair one” in the past now leads to so-and-so’s big cousin and his boys coming up to the school to take care of a problem. Orchestrating such an occasion in the past would have taken much more work, and there would have been cooling off periods in the middle of it all. Now it can all happen in an instant with a few keystrokes.
3.Ease of Cheating: In the past cheating required social skills. One either had to charm the answers off of a peer, bribe them in some way, or intimidate some one. Each of these routes has their real world parallel and, hence, students were better prepared to function within society. Now, students can cheat without having any legitimate social interaction at all. With the newest wave of smart phones, students don’t even need to type the questions to get the answers. They can just use voice commands. Why would a student read the section in the science book on volcanoes when they can just ask Google how hot magma is? How would you find the answer? It’s startling to think about how much easier it is for students of this generation to cheat.
4.Constant Distraction: Back when I was in school, when we had to hold our CD players suspended in the air on the bus and pray that we wouldn’t hit any bumps, we were limited in the distractions we had at hand. Generally, if I got bored with instruction, I had a few classroom posters at which I could stare, and the squirrels that ran by the window offered a delightful intercession. Other than that, imagination was the only escape. Contrastingly, children of this generation have access to nearly every video game imaginable, their weakened imaginations, and the greatest time sink of all time: Facebook. I’m sure there some application available where they can not only watch squirrels do things during school, but also control the squirrels. I’d name such an application “Irate Squirrels,” but I digress. My point is that, as I’m sure you’ve noticed in the last line you were standing, when one has a smart phone one never need be bored.
Cell phones and smart phones continue to change society in ways that we are only beginning to realize, so naturally this will trickle into the classroom. But this isn’t the only technology that is changing the educational system. Teachers can now post homework assignments online and encourage students to use their smart phones for good. In this way students can receive email alerts each time an assignment is posted, check the assignment from the web browsers on their smart phones, and even print the assignment out on their cloud printers. If modern technology doesn’t make this generation of children super smart, it will spoil them rotten and render them incapable of doing any real work, like getting their little fingers dusty flipping through card catalogs in the library, or going to the library.
Do you care to catch up with this generation of children? Take the first step and learn more about class websites. With new web application available to educators, making the transition can be smoother than ever.