Effects Of Technology In Education

Far too many students are deprived from receiving a quality education solely based on where they live. In low-income, rural schools, books are outdated and qualified teachers are little-to-none. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, the farther away the rural towns are from an urbanized area, the lower the test scores for math and reading. In fringe rural locations, 5 miles or less from an urbanized area, the average NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) score, which can range from 0 to 500, was 288 in math. The average score drops to 283 in distant rural locations and 279 in remote rural locations. In reading, the scores were 270, 266, and 264, respectively. These schools will continue spiraling downward …show more content…
After finishing their research, they conclude that “the digital divide is far from closed”. While one girl has extremely limited access to computers, the other cannot imagine life without computers. Teachers in low-income areas typically only assign a small amount of homework each night, since students often get stuck and require help they don’t have access to. Education is entirely different for the middle-class children. Students are given many different engaging, creative projects. Using technology, they can watch videos, surf the web, or e-mail the teacher when they come across a topic they don’t understand (Celano and Neuman). Since computers offers students an abundance of online resources, learning will no longer stop when they leave …show more content…
Without ever having access to technology, most of the students in low-income schools are far from prepared to enter the workforce. Sugata Mitra, an Educational Technology professor at Newcastle University in England, found that children do not even need instructions in order to figure out how to use a computer and learn from it. After six months, Tamil-speaking children in a South Indian village with no prior access to technology were able to score 50 percent on a biotechnology lesson which was entirely in English. Mitra concludes that “[children] can learn to use computers and the Internet by themselves, irrespective of who or where they are and what language they speak” (Mitra). Not only did they learn how to use a program that they could not read, they did not even need a teacher to guide them. This shows that students can easily learn essential workplace skills over time by simply having access to