As I’ve been reading and/or writing stories about different school districts and their plans to start the year amid the ongoing pandemic, technology has been an overarching theme.
As I’ve been reading and/or writing stories about different school districts and their plans to start the year amid the ongoing pandemic, technology has been an overarching theme.
It was barely a subplot when I was a student, which is a little odd considering I only graduated high school ten years ago.
Still, I feel like a dinosaur when I see what kids are doing with tech in schools today. Many districts distribute Chromebooks to each and every child, which has certainly helped as they are almost forced to incorporate virtual learning into their plans for the upcoming school year. Digital platforms such as Schoology are a way of life for today’s educators.
I attended a district that certainly was not hurting for money, and it wasn’t like we were carving our homework into rocks. But technology was used reluctantly. We visited the media center to cobble together cheesy PowerPoint presentations on bulky desktop computers, or work on our typing skills, but that was about it. Nobody carried around laptops, but most people had a flash drive full of unfinished essays.
Lessons came from giant, ancient text books that had passed through hundreds of hands before finding their way into the bottom of my locker.
Through elementary and most of junior high school, most assignments were still done with good old fashioned pen and paper. In sixth grade my school introduced us to PalmPilots. I don’t even remember what we did with them, but we only used them in a few classes and then never saw them again.
In high school, the most high-tech school supply we all carried around was our graphing calculators. I’m not sure what they’re meant for, but my friends and I loved to download games like Tetris and Mega Man, and try to play them in class when the teacher wasn’t looking.
I do remember teachers harping on us to not rely too much on those calculators, because it’s not like we’d be carrying one around in our pockets the rest of our lives. That still makes me laugh.
I grew up at a time when schools were terrified of technology. If a teacher caught you with a cell phone, they acted like you’d been caught dealing drugs. New ideas and tools were introduced at a glacial pace.
So what changed? Why does it seem like technology has suddenly been completely embraced by school districts across the country?
For starters, many of the teachers today are my age or even younger. They grew up with technology as a part of their everyday lives, and they’re not afraid to incorporate it into their classrooms.
More and more administrators are seeing the value in investing in virtual learning too. The outside world demanded a comfort with technology even before the pandemic forced us all apart and online. Many districts have thankfully embraced technology as a tool to keep students and faculty safe this year, but before that they saw it as a way to produce students who were ready to take on a world that is changing faster than ever.
I think there’s only a handful of districts across the state that haven’t embraced virtual learning as part of their plan this school year. For their own sake, I hope they find their way out of the Dark Ages real quick.
Blake Bacho is a staff writer for The Monroe News; he can be reached at [email protected].
