Throughout the day, Alex Oren, a freshman at Clayton High School, has a weight load that’s just a few pounds. Lugging around a small bag, he only has two things to worry about: his Macbook Air and his Wacom graphics tablet. In class, the laptop and the tablet are the tools used to do almost everything school related.
Not only is this his means for a simpler school day, it is also his way of organizing everything to maximize efficiency. From taking notes to completing homework, the tech he owns has taken root in his everyday life.
This is just one of many examples of how students are slowing integrating technology into their academic lives; whether it’s just having a smartphone to keep track of homework or even as far as a complete electronic takeover of your education, there’s no doubt that our education today is slowly being immersed into a more interactive and engaging environment.
For example, how convenient is it to just hop onto a computer and Google something up? You don’t need to take the time and effort to flip through the flimsy pages of a textbook or rummage through packets or handouts to find something, all it takes is a few keywords and some careful looking. Ctrl + F if you prefer. The knowledge of millions are at your fingertips, and when there’s a database known as Wikipedia for all of your History and Physics needs, you’re golden.
Who needs to use pencils anymore? When you can dish out 90 words per minute, typing up an essay is a walk in the park, and you don’t even have to overwork those tendons in your hand. Save space, effort and time by using a keyboard and mouse to do all of your homework.
Plus, when thousands of documents accumulated over a few years can just fit onto a device the size of your thumb, or even better, on virtually no space at all, everyone can be a treehugger without even trying.
There’s nothing more beautiful than a page full of uniform, unsmudged letters that form an essay or lab report. When you can make a flawless Powerpoint presentation, why settle for a poster with uneven edges and things that aren’t exact values? I don’t know, and neither should you.
Technology presents itself in a way that is both pleasing to the eye and to the mind, making people that are neat-freaks like me, unconditionally attracted to the beauty of right angles and perfect spacing.
And finally, technology is everything in disguise. That mind blowing piece of technology probably sitting in your pocket or backpack, your phone, is something that is so versatile. You may have never thought about it, but that App Store that you use to install all of your games and applications is something that can turn your smartphone into a 100-in-1 device. Your planner, photo editor, music player, everything’s on there. Furthermore, even the apps on the market aren’t the end of what you can do with a phone. So no, it’s not always: “There’s an app for that.”
In short, sometimes this technology that revolves around us is taken for granted. Not only do we invest our parent’s hard earned cash and time into these things, we put our future in the hands of machines that do things better than us, with us.