How Ed Tech is Changing the Face of Education

 As I went through the K-12 education system, I felt as if technology increased as I went into middle school and high school. I went to school through the Benton Community School District, which has multiple schools in the Benton County area in Iowa. I do not remember much technology being used while I was in elementary school, mostly because it was the late 2000s, and the use of the internet was fairly new. I started to experience more technology once I reached middle school, specifically because the school would issue us iPads. Though we had these iPads, I still noticed that there was quite a bit of work that was paper/pencil. From what I remember, we used a lot of resources for materials such as Google Classroom and Schoology, and then for work, we would use Notability and other sources like that.

In high school, it was somewhat the same ordeal for my freshman/sophomore year because we still had the iPads. My sophomore year was the year that the pandemic hit, so we had to alter how we would meet for class, turn in assignments, and other things like that. Instead of meeting in person, we would have classes on Zoom. It was easier for some of my core classes, but it became difficult to navigate lessons for some music classes. For things such as choir and band, it is pretty difficult to practice in a virtual setting just because of the material that we go over in these ensembles. We only had to use virtual learning here and there for the rest of my high school career, as it would only be in use if we had too high of a COVID count or a snow day. Another thing I noticed is that when I became an upperclassman in high school, we switched to Chromebooks rather than the iPads we had previously. After graduating high school, I feel my materials for classes are very half-and-half with being online and being physical paper-pencil. Though this is the case, I tend to gravitate more toward online materials to keep track of assignments.

I think that EdTech will affect the future of education and society by being a useful resource for students to learn, but it could also end up becoming a distraction and not help some students learn. Every student has a way of learning and absorbing material that works for them, whether it be paper-pencil, technology, or other materials. Referring to the section of the article titled "Gamification of Education," they state how EdTech is creating ways to make learning more interesting and fun through game-like setups online. Would this end up becoming a distraction to kids? Yes, it would be a great resource for learning materials, but it could always end up with the students playing those games on their devices rather than listening to the materials they should be learning. I think that Jarrett was on track for how this resource will help the future of education, but I believe they also should have listed some cons of how this could affect the education world.

I believe that this is a good time to bring up the upbringing of parenting with technology. I believe that one of the social issues that EdTech will bring up is how highly influenced the generation in school rights is by technology. The term "iPad Kids" has been thrown around a lot lately and I believe that using technology to learn with these types of kids could either be a big success or a trainwreck. Also because of behavior issues that have risen through this generation, they could end up just doing what they want on their devices. It's always very up in the air as children are being raised differently in different households and backgrounds. EdTech can be a great resource, but my only concern is the way that some students will take advantage of having these devices and make them a distraction.