Technology and Today's Youth
Long gone are the days of spending numerous hours of the day keeping yourself occupied with nature. This new era has been filled with high-speed computers, game consoles, cell-phones and two-way messengers. In today 's classrooms, many youth are plugging formulas into their graphing calculators rather than working it out on a piece pf paper. This era is very different than that of our parents '. Pen and paper have gone to the wayside and laptops are the new notepad. Is technology helping the youth of today or turning us less intelligent? When computers started showing up in the late seventies and early eighties they took up a whole room. Now they fit easily into a small book bag and many colleges are even beginning to require students to have one. Approximately ninety percent of people ages 5 to 17 use computers and approximately fifty-nine percent of them are online. Even younger kids are become computer savvy with one out of four 5 year olds using the internet. Computers have brought many things that our grandparents or parents thought they would never see. From online archives, libraries, databases, to being able to connect to people from all over the world. The downfall of all this "connectability" to this other digital world could lead to today 's youth doing much less of their own work and more cutting and pasting with the click of a mouse. Plagiarism is becoming a large problem in today 's schools because today 's teen tend to procrastinate until the night before a paper is due and stoop to logging on to their home computer and copying someone else 's time and hard work. I believe today 's educational system is going to have to alter their teachings slightly and lead teens to come up with their own ideas and use other 's work to support their own. The internet is supposed to be used as a tool to enhance your own beliefs and thinking, not to steal someone else 's. What has the internet done to help students who aren 't looking to take someone
Cited: Ben Feller. "90 Percent of Kids Use Computers." Internet Changes Everything. http://www.ladlass.com/archives/000738.html (18 Sept 2004) "Calculators and the Education of Youth." National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. http://www.nctm.org/about/position_statements/position_statement_01.htm (17 Sept 2004) "Gaming Statistics." Game-Research. http://www.game-research.com/statistics.asp (18 Sept. 2004)