A Classroom Beyond the Classroom: Technology as a Force of Student Empowerment by Alisha

A Classroom Beyond the Classroom: Technology as a Force of Student Empowerment by Alisha - January 2020 Scholarship Essay

Public education, throughout the vast majority of its history, has been an exercise in rigid hierarchy. Teachers taught, students learned. Those unfortunate enough to encounter dense textbooks and incomprehensible lesson plans lacked solutions that they could enact on their own. Today, this is not the case: the technological advancements of the modern age have empowered students like me to personally augment their classroom learning for the better.

Technology can act as a backup plan when a lesson doesn’t resonate. My visual learning style often clashes with math classes: I understand a concept best when it’s introduced through a graph, but most math units introduce concepts in equation form and only discuss graphical versions at the end of the unit. My school-issued computer allows me to use graphing websites as the lesson is introduced and translate the lesson into my visual ‘native language’. I also have access to full online lessons through sites like KhanAcademy to catch myself up on fast-paced or unintuitive classes. Without the online technology available through school, I would be at the mercy of the teaching style of whichever teacher I was assigned; with it, I have confidence that I will learn the material, because I can customize my classroom experience to best fit my needs.

This freedom of choice in the arena of learning resources extends even past supplementing unsatisfactory classes into students going above and beyond their curriculum to engage the subject matter on their own terms. Traditional classroom settings discourage non-curriculum learning, because a student who tries mid-class to discuss with the teacher about the finer points of the subject alienates their classmates and becomes a target for bullying. In-school technology gives curious students a wide array of safe places to advance their knowledge. They can read and participate in online forums of experts, watch tutorials and lectures on YouTube, or even extract raw information from data repositories like FAOstat. I’ve done all these things and more to pursue subjects beyond the classes that piqued my interest.

Technology is not just changing the classroom setting, but the world for which classrooms prepare the next generation. To navigate modern life takes the skills that technology makes relevant: flexibility, synthesis of many disparate sources, self-motivation -- in essence, the skills students receive the freedom to exercise when technology is integrated into their education.