Is Educational Technology Shortening Students Attention Spans?

In the article Is Educational Technology Shortening Student Attention Spans? David M. Marcovitz argues that “Life moves fast, and if you don’t multitask, you can’t keep up with it. There’s no time to focus too much attention on one thing”. In schools students are suppose to be able to experiment with new ideas and take the time they need as individuals to grasp new concepts. In today’s world some students can be skipped over by the wave of technology or use it to imitate learning. With the vast amount of information on the internet it is so easy for students to pass off someone else’s work or knowledge as their own.

On the other side of this argument John David Son promotes the use of technology in the classroom. Son states that technology “…allow students to explore rich worlds, growing generations of plants and animals in an instant, watching them die, changing the parameters, and then doing it all over again”. Technology brings a whole new element to learning. It allows students to access information at the touch of a button, but it is what they do with that information that really counts. Are they able to understand it? Are they able to analysis it? These are the important questions and why old school methods are still so important. However to reach our students “we as educators must change the way we teach and how we teach”.

I agree with both sides of this argument. However, technology is a difficult media to integrate into schools. First, many teachers and administrators do not feel comfortable using technology in the classroom. A simple solution to this problem is to send them to technology courses, however these are expensive and time consuming. Another difficult obstacle schools face with technology is providing computer and internet access to all classroom and all students. Until these two issues are solved it is impossible for us as a society to expect technology to be used in all classrooms.