In today’s society, technology’s influence has had a profound and lasting effect.  These impacts have been both beneficial and negative to life and the learning environment.  Nowadays, everyone carries a smart phone around with them, and always has access to a laptop or computer.  These devices being readily available to the youth population has positive and negative impacts on the current day.

To start off with, technology has many negative impacts on people in society.  In today’s world, everyone carries around a smart phone, and a laptop from people in their teens to adults.  These smart phones and laptops can be very distracting, especially for the youth population.  These phones carry multiple social media apps, which are very beneficial to keeping in touch with friends, but these social media apps can also be a big distraction to the user.   In class, when students are learning, and they get a notification, the student becomes very distracted. They have an urge to check and see what the notification is.  If a student goes to check their phone, they become distracted from the lesson, and have the potential to miss important information.  Similar to the phone, the laptop contains games, which students may play in class while the teacher is teaching. This can cause a student’s grades to drop, because they are not fully engaged and educated on the subject that they are learning, and are missing part of the lesson.

Even though technology may have downsides there are also many benefits that it has to learning.  When a student has a question, they are able to Google the question, and get the answer within seconds.   Also, teachers are able to make lesson plans on the laptop, and some that are interactive, so that the student can be involved in the lesson.  Apps such as Peardeck and Kahoot are two common interactive ways of learning that can benefit the student.  These apps allow the student to follow along on their laptop and be actively involved in the lesson.  Kahoot is also a very fun way to have the student review the material before a quiz. As well as these fun interactive learning ways, it is also beneficial to the teachers’ grading process.  Teachers can now give tests or quizzes on the computer, which can be automatically graded, and then the teacher just has to grade the open-ended questions.

Over the years, technology has become a huge part of people’s lives in today’s society, and has changed the world for better and for worse.  The technology in today’s society can provide multiple distractions, which could possibly be harmful to a student’s learning.  While it may become a distraction, it also has many benefits for teaching and learning.  Also, it has been very beneficial in helping people communicate easily in today’s society.  Overall, technology has many benefits in society, and is changing the world for the better.