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
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