Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Is Technology Hurting or Helping our Students?

The internet has become an integrated part of most of our lives. Many students use the web to help them succeed in today’s world. With this access to the internet students today can get more done than ever before. What would take a student weeks to do a project can take a day. The internet gets a bad reputation in the world of college students for being a distraction among them but it’s not always the case. I believe it has more positives then negatives in the world of education especially college students. Talking about just phones for example the average student will use the internet for 34.4 minutes a day. It may not always be a constructive 34 minutes but at times it is and I plan to show that this new age of technology is a good age. Not only do they use the internet to be productive but also to keep in touch with family and friends and this connection helps student get through college. With all this in mind I went around my campus to see how students used this technology and if they found it more helpful than it’s thought to be.

Communication

Most students are far from home and loved ones. They will most likely make friends on campus but they still want to talk to people who are in their home town, the people that they have known for years. According to the Huffington Post about 99.8 percent of college students have a cellphone at their disposal to use. That cell phone is their connection to the outside world in a sense. Many Professors frown upon such devices in the classroom which makes sense to a degree. These student were born into this new era of communication, instant messaging has always been there way to communicate when far from someone. How does this relate to college kids doing well in school? I asked a few student on campus and they all said something similar, that their cellphone was their “life line”. They all said it was how they kept in contact with everyone which makes sense but when I asked what would happen if you were not able to message and communicate with others and they all respond with another similar answer to one another. They would be worried, stressed they don’t know what’s going one and lonely. Students already go through a lot and if they did not have this communication it could be a lot worse. Nick Josephs, a freshman at SVC, video calls his family once a week. He says, “It makes me feel at home for a moment, I get to know what’s going on at home” This simple methods of talking to people help students stay focused. Getting a Facebook message could help a student get their work done because they know they can talk to anyone, anywhere in a moment and this could make them feel a lot less stressed.

Helpful Sites

When I was in high school and you missed a math or physics class you knew you might be in trouble. Missing one section could ruin the whole chapter and make it very difficult to get caught up and result in failing a test but you could always see your teacher for help after school. Students in college who miss or struggle in the class room can’t always get the help they need like in high school and so they look for help elsewhere and this is where the internet becomes helpful. Sites like Kahn Academy end up helping and saving these students from bad grades. Kahn Academy came around in 2006 and has been helping student ever since it became public. As of 2012 Kahn Academy has over 10 million students who view their instructional videos and take their online quizzes. Similar sites and YouTube channels followed their setup since then. Crash Course for example is a YouTube channel that has short, educational videos that are easy for students to mentally digest. Since it came out in 2006 they have accumulated over 3.6 million subscribers and 297 million views as of June 2015. Both these channels help student with everything from history to mathematics. They have short instructional videos that students can view and get the gist of and so they don’t fall behind in class. Kahn Academy mostly focus on math while Crash Course is history but they both overlap with biology, astrology, and English lessons. These sites are often used my students in all grades but when you can’t always see your professor in college sites like this end up helping them and those number don’t lie.

The Students


In the end all of the students found technology to be more helpful to the students. Even though all of them said they used sites like Facebook and Snap chat they also used the internet to help them when they are stuck. If they could not answer a question they googled it got what they need. All of them have also used the schools ProQuest data base to help them with research papers and topics. Without the web they would have never been able to get all the scholarly articles they have. They would have been limited to what their texts books had. Out of the ten student I interviewed all of them have heard of Kahn Academy but one 2 of them have used it. Some of them heard about it in high school while other heard about it in college. The thing is they all know it exist if they need help with something. Only one of the students have heard of Crash Course in high school and says their teacher used it as an aid in the classroom. They student said it was helpful to an extent but the teacher was able to fill in the blanks for her. 




Links to Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/28/998-of-college-students-h_n_628161.html