The future of technology and the fear of falling behind.

Our future classrooms are inconceivable, which is what I take most from this lecture. Technology and the advancements that have rapidly been made have made our world incognizable compared to just a few decades ago. A classroom today looks very different from a classroom in 2004, and even more so a few decades before that. The technology we have today and the resources we have at our fingertips are remarkable considering how young the internet is, as well as how dependent on these resources we as a society have become. The world will continue changing rapidly, and there is so much technology we will continue to have to learn and integrate into the classrooms, I often wonder how long I’ll be able to keep up. My mother is pretty computer-smart but doesn’t understand why a four-year-old tablet is too old. I wonder if I will be able to keep up as well as she has, but I feel all the time I’m already behind!

As discussed in class, YouTube can teach you anything. The integration of YouTube into a classroom is almost a must in the modern-day classroom. At home YouTube also plays a vital role in the education of children, with creators like Miss Rachel, YouTube has made quality education in the home more accessible than ever. Miss Rachel has hundreds of toddler learning videos online and has a Master’s of Education from New York University, as well as is currently pursuing a Master’s of Early Childhood Education, providing quality, developmentally relevant content for free for anybody to access.

My reaction to the video as a whole, is that it honestly was nostalgic. Being 2008, the video had video examples that I hadn’t seen since childhood, but the nostalgia quickly turned to feeling maybe a little old. I wonder often what the world will look like in the future technology-wise, as well as how technology and its advancements will shape the youth growing in a technologically immersive world, where privacy is now rarely possible outside the home, and everybody is always connected. Connection was never possible at the scale it is possible today, and will this eventually end up in humans being less and less connected? People forget that they are connected to actual people while online, just like while driving you sometimes forget it’s a human being with feelings who just cut you off. I sometimes wonder what it is that people my age do that the younger generation would never believe that we used to do. Like how my mother lived most of her life without a cell phone, will me socializing in the manners I have, be very shocking and different to today’s youth? Probably. But what has the benefit been to the environment I grew up in? What was the downfall? Is it better than the post-internet world that exists today? Time will tell, I suppose.