Does technology = better grades?

In Fairfax County, Virginia, after implementing the new Whiteboard technology in their schools, they saw a huge increase in student test scores and performance in all grades. All the technology companies are promising schools that by purchasing their educational technology devices they will ensure that their students do better in school and get better test scores. People are starting to say that spending millions on new educational technology is not only a waste of money, it’s not proven to help improve test scores and make schools better, it just makes them different.

Technology is a big thing and it’s very complicated, so people can be afraid of it. Scared of the vulnerability it might create, due to hackers or the fact that they can’t control the technology 100 percent of the time. Regardless of people’s fears of technology, it is something that should be added to the curriculum of schools, simply based on the fact that technology is incorporated into everyday life after school. In college and work settings, technology is used extensively throughout life and it is important for a student to be prepared and have a good understanding of technology and how to use it.

Traditional people who don’t care about technology and who grew up without it feel that today’s kids shouldn’t have such constant access to technology and that it hinders their education rather than helping them. They feel that it creates too many shortcuts to the old way of reading a textbook and researching what they need to find. Somehow that could be true. With Google, you can find anything, pre-written essays for a fee, websites that explain books and provide help on the topic of the book so the student doesn’t have to read it, they can also literally type the question into Google and find the answer. So in a way, technology creates a lot of shortcuts and gives a lot of students the opportunity to cheat.

Regardless of whether the Internet or technology in general gives kids more access to cheats or shortcuts, kids who do this and try to get an easy way out of a task would have done it differently if the technology wasn’t available. They would have cheated their partner on a test or paid a “nerd” to write the essay for them. Technology is a great thing and has helped many people, and because it is now being incorporated into schools, it is capturing more attention from students and making them feel more comfortable in the classroom. Nowadays, it is important to incorporate this educational technology in the classrooms because that is the future. Our future is based on new technology and any job you have in the future will depend on some kind of technological advance, whether you work in a supermarket or in a law firm on Wall Street in a big city.