- Orig. Document Link ⇒ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bh6X-IcOmVW2hPlq9lwpuCKzzk_LuBihadEhhW-plKs/edit?usp=sharing
Is technology outrightly harmful to the intricate and curious minds of the young individuals in our schools? To answer your question; no, it isn’t. It might be a surprise to critics who believe that textbooks are significantly better than the laptops we use today, but it is profoundly untrue and intellectually dishonest to state that old, boring, and outdated textbooks are greater than laptops – which have access to 114 million up-to-date articles, journals, and papers. We have technology in our everyday world that has 5.56 billion people accessing it daily, and limiting our students not only takes away their potential to learn, but also innovation. So, it is my paramount duty as a student myself, to inform you of the power of the laptops we hold in our fingertips, to inform you of the efficiency of information collection and organisation we find from these screens, and the interconnectivity and collaboration it provides to the students in our schools today. Lend me your ears, so I can inform you why students should have the power that our past generations couldn’t.
Let’s begin with a clear and honest fact, technology has taken over our world today. Why should we disallow students from accessing the endless seas of articles and academic knowledge that they could possibly find from the technology that we have at our fingertips? We would be putting the future generation at a severe disadvantage, disconnecting them from the more updated information that could have been found. An article from PubMed Central states that scholarly articles update their information constantly, with updates consisting of multiple times a week. If we compare that to outdated published textbooks, students actually lose key information that may have been found through using laptops to access the internet and significantly compromises their studies and academic knowledge. So it is not our right, nor is it the right choice to halt students from receiving the best and up-to-date information with the greatest tools to succeed.
As a student and aspiring academic myself, it has been exceedingly difficult to collaborate with my fellow peers in collecting, aggregating, and organising crucial information for our studies using only an outdated textbook and physical items. It is paramount to say that the technology we use through laptops has significantly aided many students like myself across the globe to collaborate with peers, and taking it away would be extremely detrimental. Imagine a place where tools such as Google Docs, Drive, and Slides wereould be completely inaccessible to millions of students, with aspects such as real-time interconnectivity within students and ease of editing becoming non-existent. Students would be frustrated, upset, and in pain trying to collaborate on one physical piece of paper to fit the large, necessary amount of information. Wouldn’t taking these away not only be calamitous for these poor and struggling young teenagers, but also make it inefficient for collaborating and learning in group environments within school? Let us not be careless and reduce such useful aspects of learning with laptops to technology of the past, and ensure one of the many integral pieces of academic aid remains for today and the future.
To limit the students who learn today, is to limit the knowledge and advancement of the future. To disallow the tools that we are able to provide, is to remove the potential capabilities our society could thrive on. To halt students from using powerful technology through laptops to learn, is to strip away the newly crafted aspects of improved interconnectivity and information aggregation, and the millions of up-to-date articles and journals we can find now. Let us not conclude our advancement of education with technology of the past and look forward to the ability of technology of the present and future. If we continue to stand still in the limits of our past, we will never move to the future we dreamed upon. As Emma Watson once said, “if not us, who? If not now, when?”