Nowadays, schools are becoming more and more reliant on technology to teach their students. In some circumstances, this is incredibly useful. It’s extremely helpful in terms of being able to find information quickly without having to read through a bunch of books and talk to a bunch of people over one simple question.

However, it gets to a point where I wonder how much technology is truly helping us. Are we becoming increasingly incompetent the more we rely on technology, or are we advancing our brains due to the endless information we could find?

People have been students and teachers for literally thousands of years, and computers weren’t available to students until around 2009, and even then, most classrooms only had a couple computers that were meant for student use.

I remember not having my own school chromebook for the majority of my elementary school experience, and the first time I was able to take it home was during the COVID lockdown when many students were going to school virtually. 

Before people had computers at school, most of the work was written on paper, which can be beneficial in many ways. Physically writing things down helps with memory retention, physical visualization, as well as creativity and problem solving. The downsides are that paper is much easier to misplace, it’s more difficult to make revisions and edits, and it is much more time consuming than typing things out. 

While computers make many things easier, I think we need to take a step backward, specifically in the school area.

With things like AI, it’s becoming too easy for students. The point of school is for students to learn, and when it’s this easy for students to find answers and to get the assignments done with minimal effort, students aren’t truly learning anything. 

Additionally, the availability of technology nowadays allows students to be doing things they aren’t necessarily supposed to be doing during instructional hours. Technology makes it very easy for students to do things like playing video games at inappropriate times, it makes it easier for students to cheat on assignments other than assessments of learning because those assignments typically aren’t assigned on a lockdown browser. 

It’s good that students have a way to gain additional clarification and knowledge about their work, however if they are using AI and Google as a primary resource to get the answers rather than using the resources provided, it doesn’t benefit students at all in the long run. 

If they’re not using their access to the internet to enhance their learning rather than just copying and pasting onto their assignments, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll remember anything they read, which would lead to bad test grades. Whereas if they are using the internet to clarify information on the resources already given to them, they’re a lot more likely to do well on assessments, and they’ll be better able to justify their answers. 

It’s not like technology has no place in schools. There are so many things that technology can do to help, we just need to be more mindful of the harm it could possibly cause on education.