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Education is constantly searching for the spark that changes everything (Heick). Having an education that has spanned over a decade of technological innovation, I believe that the spark is technology.

When I was in elementary school my teachers used transparencies to project things on the board and our computer lab had gigantic, colorful, old-school Macintosh desktop computers. In the classroom, we were never able to use computers or other technology, because a lot of it did not exist, and the things that did exist were not utilized. Now, I hear stories about fourth-grade classroom that use iPads on a daily basis and see classrooms full of sophisticated docu-cams. I cannot help but wonder how this technological revolution has affected education.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the majority of education took place at home or in one-room school houses. In these school houses, the teacher oversaw small learning communities where students taught those in the grades below them and children learned together (Collins and Halverson). During this time learning was a social practice, not a didactic one. However, the vast immigration and technology that came along with the Industrial Revolution put new demands on education, and was a start to the formation of the modern schooling system (Collins and Halverson).

Today, a Knowledge Revolution of personal computers, the Internet, and cell phones fuels education. These devices have put endless information at our fingertips and have transformed education from being a hands-on experience to an inferential one with an emphasis on the skills of accessing, evaluating, and synthesizing information (Collins and Halverson). Technology may be to blame for shortcomings such as shorter attention spans...

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...ting” (qtd. in Richtel).

Fortunately, a lot of educators have the foresight to realize that technological advances are not entirely responsible for students’ shorter attention spans. Hope Molina-Porter, a California high school teacher, wonders if “teachers were adding to the problem by adjusting lessons to accommodate shorter attention spans” (qtd. in Richtel). Additionally, the associate director for research at Pew Research Center, Kristen Purcell, argues that what is seen as distractions could also be considered a failure to understand how modern children process information (qtd. in Richtel).

The newfound decline in attention spans is also seen in students’ lack of perseverance when researching and doing in-depth work. It is especially seen in students whose parents allow them to have unlimited access to devices like televisions and video games (Richtel).