Do you wish you had the technology of today when you were in HS?

In some ways yes, but in other ways no…I’m glad there were no mobiles phones. It would have made some things easier…I’m just not sure if that’s a good thing or not, I probably wouldn’t have spent much time in libraries, if I could just Google everything…hmmm…? There are positives and negatives…if you didn’t have the money for a decent computer & all the gadgets, you could be left behind. Albert Einstein didn’t need them, are we better off with all that…or are we spiraling downward because of technology…? hmmm…dunno

filletofspam: I hear you there, although I find spell check useless anyway- being from New Zealand, some words are spelled differently there than in the US (the default for spell check). I often find loads of words I’ve actually spelled correctly light up.

I spent a lot of high school without a lot of the technologies my friends had- hey, I got my first cellphone only a few years back when I got a job, while most of my friends had them since they were 14. Before then, I had an emergency payphone card in my wallet if I needed to call home. The way I see it, loads of the technology we have now we don’t actually need, but we’ve grown accustomed to having it, so we’re under the illusion we need it. I know for a fact that I can live without my cellphone, laptop and iPod, I just don’t want to.

Sorry if I’ve gone off on a tangent, but my basic point is that sure, some of the technology we have now is useful, but if It were taken away tomorrow, I don’t think I’d be too devastated.

The one technology that would have really helped me is the spell checker. I’ve always been a rotten speller. I had a writing class my Sr. year of high school where every spelling error cost you a letter grade. I had to look up many words in a dictionary in a typical essay.

OK. I might have used a mobile to let my mum know where I was, that I was safe, that I’d be home soon etc - the kind of things mums need to know! We got into a huge row once when I just forgot to get in contact, and she panicked. It would be a lot easier to let her know, nowadays.

I am glad it wasn’t available, because as you see now people don’t care about books and serious study, it’s good to have cell phone and email but not in schools.

The thing I see as a real advantage is the ability to type some or all of your work instead of handwriting everything. My husband has a serious handwriting problem and no-one really took his academic ability seriously until he bought himself a basic computer at university. Once lecturers didn’t have to struggle with his handwriting, they started giving him higher grades immediately! His motivation also improved because he wasn’t having to suffer from the physical discomfort of writing badly.

Other technological items can be used creatively to help struggling students - recording your homework details on your phone or ipod if you are dyslxic and can’t re-read the scrawl in your homework notebook, for example. But otherwise, I think they’re a serious waste of time in school.

Well, I’m not asking as it pertains to school…but in general about when you were high school age.