By: Abigail Davis
How Times Have Changed with the Internet
It is 2003 and you just turned in your big final project. Plot twist: you wrote it with a pencil and turned it in on paper. Now you are going to the library to turn in the books you signed out. You go home after school and do your homework on paper using your textbook written in 1999. You listen to your MP3 player while you finish your homework. When you finish, you go outside and mow the lawn...
Sounds weird right? Today, computers, chromebooks, and iPhones are the center of our learning and entertainment. Teachers plan their lessons around the use of technology. Some classes, such as dual enrollment, are completely online classes. The majority of assignments today are turned in through a certain type of online server. Furthermore, most AP classes are taught using powerpoints and video. Some of Mary Persons classes are all online. For example, Business and Technology classes, college classes completed at school, and the yearbook. Without technology and wifi, the advancements of these classes would not be possible.
Many of our notes are taken on powerpoints and educational websites and we review our content through Quizlet, Kahoot, and Quizizz. We write our papers on Google Docs, we do our projects on Google Slides, and all our assignments are found on Google Classroom. I was speaking with Mr. Smith (History), and he said, “When I started teaching here I asked for a projector (the one you write on), and it took them forever to set up and still it hardly ever worked. Even Mr. Magda would pass around books and pictures as notes.” Over the past couple of weeks, students here at Mary Persons have experienced, first-hand, on how difficult school has become with the wifi being turned off. The way we have adjusted to the internet, teachers and students have become completely dependent on it. Research shows that wifi has a positive impact on learning. Students and teachers are increasingly using wifi-enabled devices for educational purposes. This generation of students is a very digital generation. We have become so dependent on the internet that without it we handicap ourselves.
Combining technology in education helps students stay engaged. Most students today have been using mobile devices like tablets and smartphones to play and learn since they could crawl. Therefore, it only seems logical to align today's classrooms with the way that your students want and are used to learning. The traditional text-book way of learning has been officially broken. However, more “traditional” teachers may disagree, but if we, as a school, are going to keep up with the world around us we must keep up with the technology and different ways of learning. It is crazy how much has changed.
Abigail is an 11th grade student at Mary Persons High School