Skip to main content

Thoughts from Middle Schoolers

 How do middle school students see technology as affecting their education and lives? 

This week I decided to sit down and have some conversations with my students before releasing them for the summer. I asked them specifically how they felt technology had influenced their education and social lives. These were some of the responses I got, paraphrased from the general Gen Z vernacular:

"I think that technology can be cool, but it can also be repetitive. Some teachers do the same things over and over, which gets old." 

'I wish I could only be on my Chromebook all the time. It's more fun than anything else in class." 

"I don't want technology to take over my life. I think the 90s were cool, people talked to each other more." "Okay, but I talk to people all the time, just on my phone." 

"My chromebook helps me learn, I don't like doing book work because it is boring," 

"I like book work, I can understand it better." 

"Technology can be a time suck for me, sometimes I'll scroll TikTok until 2AM. I would like to be able to use it less, but I also can't imagine my life without it."


Overall, I think the learning preferences of students still must be taken into account. Most of my students like using technology to learn, but they also want to be challenged with it. They find teachers who use the same things over and over to be boring. Technology does not automatically equal challenge and rigor, so teaching techniques and strategies still have to be implemented, they just might look a little different. Overall, I think that students want to unplug from time to time- they are aware of the issues that technology presents socially. My student who mentioned life being better in the 90s made me giggle a little bit, but it also gave me hope that they will not be a generation unable to function without screens. 

Comments

  1. Content CreatorMay 26, 2025 at 9:45 AM

    This blog made me stop and think about my own classroom and the abundance of personalities in each class. One of our science curriculums is heavy on student generated technology products. i have been using it for about 3 years now. It always felt like something was missing though. Until, i needed to fill the last part of a week and I required the student to leave appropriate feedback for each others projects. The projects were not involved by any means, they were just Canva based infographics, but you would think they had designed the best thing since sliced bread with the enthusiasm they were showing towards each others projects. Maybe too many times we forget that peer 2 peer interactions are powerful tools even in the online world.

    ReplyDelete
  2. HBMay 30, 2025 at 12:09 PM

    Hi Joraan! Thank you for sharing this perspective. Being a middle school teacher must be really challenging and rewarding! I'm an academic advisor for undergraduates, and I'm so appreciative of all the work that the K-12 teachers and staff do. It is always interesting to hear perspectives directly from the students themselves. The comment about the 90s is funny -- I've actually heard similar sentiments from my college students! Some of my students seem really fed up with the place technology has in their life, while others seem to love it. I recently had a student tell me "I feel like I've learned more from tiktok than I have from school," which was like a dagger to my heart! I hope that isn't true... But it also shows the educational potential of social media. You've inspired me to talk to some of my college students about the place that technology has in their lives, and hopefully write a similar blog post in the future :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Effects of Social Media in the Classroom

  Link to Article This week I found an interesting article on the effects social media can have on student academics. The study uses a mixed methodology of interviews, literature reviews, and data analysis of found patterns.  Overall, this article found that social media has an overall negative effect on student's grades, focus, attention span, and classroom behavior.  HOWEVER.  I find that the educators and students identified and analyzed in this article are rooted in extremely traditional educational values and rules. I think it is rather obvious that social media would not be beneficial to the traditional classroom. These methods are generally rooted in lecture, work, and assessment, with little room for choice outside of what the teacher leads. Social media does not have to "undermine learning" in high school classrooms.  The world has changed so much in the last 10 years alone. I graduated from high school in 2013, and we were just getting to the point whe...
1 comment
Read more

Week 11 Reflection

 This week, the majority of my energy went towards my produsage assignment. For my project, I chose to focus on something that I can use at the middle school where I work: a lesson on literary analysis. This is a concept that can be difficult to teach, especially when you have students who hate reading. The traditional "assign a story and answer questions about it" is not engaging to this generation of students. Asking them to read independently can be like pulling teeth, depending on the class.  My project was created with the goal of combining traditional reading, writing, and analysis skills with the engagement of social media. Analysis can happen in so many forms, so I thought sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook would serve as great mediums for showcasing their analysis. It gives them a choice in how they would like to present their analysis: they could create a TikTok from the perspective of a character, create a moodboard on Pinterest that reflects the theme of t...
Post a Comment
Read more