Moving Forward in Life

So I got a few questions to really ponder about today while I blabber on about life. 

So today's big focus is all about technology in the first place. As new things come in, older things phase out. do you ever see anyone using myspace anymore? no. It was all taken over by Facebook. I think similarly with this website. it isn't something people use now that other, more popular social media sites exist and provide the entertainment for us.  

So what influences teachers and students to use technology in the classroom?

Technology as we use it is all more for the sense of convenience. It takes things that usually are long lasting, tedious, and mundane activities, and it gives us shortcuts to learn faster, without having to take every step there. its like driving a car or taking a train somewhere vs. walking to that same destination. These kind of little things help us become more efficient. One of the prime examples that I think about is an essay that is being collaboratively written between me, and 3 other classmates. Less than 20 years ago, we would have to have gotten together to research in the library, find information, collect it in a coherent manner, and then write or type it all out on a computer that we probably rent or loan, since most people didn't have personal laptops at that time, more rather they had desktops that were expensive and a hassle.

Now a days, I just use my phone for everything. Sometimes I get really bothered by the fact that I get a weekly update every sunday on how much I used my phone, and see that there was over 10 hours of my day spent on it. I freak out every time! What am I doing? wasting my life away at this. But then I look at the details. I see the amount of time spent on youtube, watching documentaries about the history of different tribal nations in the Philippines, and how they connect and interact today with the modern "low-land" Filipinos (tribal and traditional filipinos call the modernists "low-land" because the indigenous people live up in the high-lands/mountains while the more modern/western Filipinos are literally lower to the lands, on the ports and seas, speaking spanish/english/tagalog, etc.) and all of a sudden, I don't feel too bad about it, because even though it seems like nothing was done in front of a screen, information filled my mind. It works. I was being productive towards the mind rather than the body. 

Am I a Digital Native? 

Yeah. I definitely am, no doubt about it. I was born in the digital era, and I have never known what life is like without technology. There are hilarious jokes that my parents always talk about how I was the "Little Einstein" not because I excelled in any specific subject or topic, but because at the age of two, I knew how to not only turn on and log into the computer, I knew my alphabet because of the keyboard, but I also could legitimately play this one video game on the computer called Lemmings. Because of this, in elementary school, me, along with many of my friends would already know how to use computers/technology that my teachers would struggle to teach us how to use. It was always a blast teaching the teachers in some cases. 

Easier learning

I think many of the teachers that are digital immigrants are people that genuinely enjoy the classrooms of the early 2000s, because there wasn't an opportunity for us to cheat, but also, the teachers didn't have to focus so much on lesson plans, and they were able to share, use programs, and keep student's attention on reading books, letters, articles, essays, and so on. And of course, we didn't mind because it was always followed with coolmathgames.com, Poptropica, and Club Penguin (RIP). I will say though, that as technology develops, especially the usage of AI chats and robots such as Siri, Alexa, and more recently CPGChat (my Polysci professor taught us how to use), The "native" digital users like me and my generation, are going to be outsourced and become a new generation of digital immigrants, with a different whole generation of technology that we will have to learn, re-learn, while the younger generations grow up in it.