In recent years, less than twenty percent of US teens report reading a book, magazine or newspaper daily for pleasure, while more than eighty percent say they use social media every day, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
The evolution of technology plays a vital role in our life, also the growth of world’s economy and education is based on the advancement of technology, but this doesn’t deny its negative effects on education at the level of reading habits and the social skills, which impact the quality of education. So, that we need to make some changes in the lifestyle because the more smartly we use technology the better our success would be, and we save our lives from this addiction.
Firstly, reading more books increase the verbal results and improves speaking skills, which gives the readers the ability to express in more aware and cultural ways and develops the capability of speaking extensively, which attracts the recipient to listen. But with the invention of social media, Internet, and networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have become source of major distractions for students. They are so attached to these sites feeling that they enjoy their time, where in fact they waste it on chatting, messaging, watching TV programs. For example, according to Google's Eric Schmidt, Sherry Turkle, in her essay ‘Education Attentionally Disarray’, tells us about his own experience how the technology affects his reading habit: “Now I spend all my time being online, doing my emails, interacting and all that, and not reading books”. So, that shows how being more addicted to these networks which gives plenty of things to enjoy but, at the same time losing the relation with the books. Therefore, this decreases the ability of students to build new thoughts and reduce their creativity skills. Further, the help of this online platforms and apps to write affect the writing skills. First, while technology encourage students to write more frequently, they also tend to use shorter formats which reduce their academic writing and texts become too informal. Also, students had problems to begin writing without the use of writing platforms, they are not able to act independently. They become lazy because, they don’t use the power of their brain, and they know that they are able to get the answer easier.
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Secondly, although learning to work together as a team is an important part of student’s education, got lost with too much dependence on cellphones and other digital technology. Even if they are physically together, they are detached from each other due to be completely attached with their technological device, such as a laptop or smartphone, which impact the human’s interactions and been replaced with human to machine interactions, where students prefer to work with these devices to do their work. Sherry Turkle notes on her essay 'Education Attentional Disarray' the absence of collaboration between students when she required a midterm project for them, saying: “But there had been no late nights and long tables, all the collaboration had happened on Ghats and Google Docs”. Due to this technology, it has produced a new method of interaction and communication. Now all students are interacting with others through different platforms, which create a several problems for many students, that they don’t know how to interact with others when they meet them in person. There is nothing worse than seen a group of students at a meeting all looking down at their phones.
Given the bad impact of technology on the habit of reading books, the students must start to limit the use of the social media and minimize the time of checking phones. They need to organize their time depends the importance of things they need to do. Also, is better to try to read books for pleasure and share what you learned from these texts to your colleagues and friends. I also think that teachers should be responsible for teaching reading strategies for students to let them enjoy it and cultivate an attitude. In addition, more reading help students to develop their writing skills by memorizing how the words look like. Also, they need to practice regularly to write by hand.
Further, in order to save our human interactions which, affect the student’s relation, teachers need to provide opportunities for students to discuss ideas in small group or a whole class discussion. On the other hand, students need to encourage each other to improve the natural communication skills, they must be respectful and listen well to a student explaining his idea because the use of these technological devises while is talking it’s unrespectful.
While there is no doubt that technology has changed life for better and easier, we cannot ignore its negative effects on education, which result from the extensive use of laptops and phones, also social media. Thus, students need to be conscious of the both positive and negative consequences of this technology, where they should avoid the bad side to get benefited and more controlled on their lifestyle and improve their creativity and skills at school. So, let’s work together to save ourselves from this addiction.
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