Technology: Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Like every thing in life there is usually a positive side and a negative side. Technology is not an exception. Some see technology as being the way of the future, while others see technology interfering with student’s creativity. Technology just isn’t computers, but it also is television, Internet, and calculators as well.
Television is something that parents and teachers should be concerned about. It’s said that children spend an estimated equivalent of two months of the year watching television. (Becoming A Teacher, by Parkay et. Etc.) This is something that parents should be concerned about. When I was a child, the only television that I was allowed to watch was one morning cartoon show before school, and that was before I was dropped off before daycare and sometimes Inspector Gadget when I got home from school. I also watched educational shows like Magic School Bus and Reading Rainbow that taught me numbers, alphabets, and how the different organs in the body or teaching about the different planets in outer space. Since I couldn’t watch that much television I had nothing else to do but read, so my reading skills are a lot better than my younger brother who now will sit in front of the television watching Chinese shows from

from satellite, so his reading skills aren’t as strong. Children should be limited to the amount of television they watch, and the television shows that they do watch should be appropriate for their age group and should be closely monitored by their parents.

Many teachers and professors demand that any essays, research papers or projects be typed and printed from the computer. Very little accept hand written assignments. Computers has its benefits and consequences. Benefits is that there are many educational programs that conditions students with certain skills like math and spelling. There are other programs that are created by the creators of Magic School Bus and they have many interactive games for students to do while teaching about the ocean, the solar system or the human body. There are computer games that allows the player to be the master and can control armies like Age of Empire, or make a human and control it’s life, by making your human get a job, buy or build a house and decorate it like Sims. Computers teach skills that can be used for word processing, making spreadsheets, or making PowerPoint. Those who don’t have the basic skills using Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint or other similar programs will have difficulties obtaining a job that has a lot of work being done in Microsoft Word or Excel.

The Internet again is can be good and bad. There are many Internet sites, some have scholarly information, and some Internet sites are just information about the author’s opinion, or his beliefs. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out which information is fact and which is opinion. There are many consequences with the Internet; accepting files, downloading music, or even going on a web page that claims that the computer needs a certain type of program to see the web page properly can easily download viruses. At school using the Internet, depending on the type of server, is usually slow and it may take ten minutes to get to a web page, when the time allotted for each class is fifty minutes; time is wasted for waiting to get the school’s home page. Students have access to many different web pages, many pages that shouldn’t be viewed by young children or those under the age of eighteen. Many families have more than one computer, maybe one for the parents and one for the children because the parents don’t want their children messing up their computer or deleting anything important, or maybe the family has one computer but it’s in a different room where parents aren’t usually around. I believe that computers should be in an area where parents can easily see what their children are looking at, this will make their children uncomfortable and they won’t go to any web pages that are questionable if they are supposed to be there. Another problem with Internet is the chat rooms available online. With c