My Experience of Technology & Learning

For this post, I asked could we live without technology and how has it changed our lives? So, I looked at my own experiences of technology.  I recently went on a trip to Cardiff and felt such a rush of panic when I realised I had forgotten my mobile phone. What pursued was a haste of frantically grabbing my wife’s phone to contact my parents, continuously saying “I can’t go without my phone, what if my son needs me?” (Again, I must add, my wife had her phone but this still was not good enough for me) and a desperate plea to my parents to bring me the phone before I caught the train. I tell you the sigh of relief I felt when that phone was placed in my longing hand where it belonged was so satisfying. The most worrying part about this tale is that, I think I used the phone once to see how my son was doing, once to ring a friend and twice to take a photo…was that really worth the over the top hyperventilating that had happened earlier that day? Or is that just the world we have now become accustomed to, where contacting others is so easily done and forgetting your phone is just as disastrous as forgetting money or any other such necessity? Anyway, I digress, my point is can anyone really say they could live without technology and that it hasn’t changed the world? When everything we do every single day is dictated by it? When I see my 76 year old grandmother walking around with a mobile phone, my honest answer has to be no.  My mother is a self-confessed digital immigrant or in her words she isn’t “computer savvy” however, she has a smart phone and a tablet and that doesn’t include the non-modern technology she also owns such as, a television, house phone and washing machine, so is she truly being honest with herself that she hasn’t fully embraced technology into her everyday life?

My first recognition of computer software in school was during a graphic design lesson where a huge brown piece of equipment was used to programme the story of Robin Hood, which was in approximately 2001. As seen across.

Fast forward to the present day and my 5 year old son comes home to tell me that he has been using the interactive white board and an IPad…how times change. I have previously discussed under the post   ‘Technology and Teaching (Ted Talk)’ about how I feel technology is taking away from the student to teacher interaction. However, how can I, someone who nearly had a panic attack about forgetting my phone, honestly say that I do not like technology and do not want to use it? It would be very hypocritical of me to say that technology hasn’t tremendously improved everyone’s lives and especially in the world of learning; however, there are also bad points.  In a recent numeracy lesson I delivered, learners were asked to complete basic multiplications and each person asked “why do I need to learn this, I have my phone with a calculator on me all the time?” another question posed, included – “why would I need to find out, when I can just google it?” and isn’t that just a little bit sad? People do not feel the need to learn as everything they need to know is at a touch of a button, has technology as a world made us lazy and ignorant to learn?

I turned to a technological invention that has dramatically changed my life, for the answer – Google. Jeffries (2013) reported that we and especially young people now live in a hyper-stimulating world where we feel that finding out an answer is tedious when we can get instant answers with a few clicks of a button. This has resulted in us having shorter attention spans and being easily distracted which can have detrimental effects during general chalk and talk lessons. There is a risk that teaching is a dying art form with future learning being all online; however, it is the role of the teacher to embrace technological advances and consider how to best use these in the classroom. It is also their role to look at other ways of forming bonds with students and encouraging interaction, even if there is a computer screen between the 2 of them (Wilkins, 2014).

It is in my opinion that technology has certainly improved everyone’s lives for the better and within learning it has opened up a whole new world for students to explore and discover. However, I think it is important to note that teachers should not solely rely on technology to teach and that too many PowerPoints, for example can kill a lesson (I talk from experience). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – technology should be an aide to teaching; and if done correctly can have a very positive effect on how students learn, develop and interact with the teacher.