In today’s digital age, its hard to imagine a world where graduate school doesn’t involve video tutorials, notes taken on laptops, and emailed homework. Some classes even label in the syllabus, BYOD, or “bring your own device”. So where do students actually use technology in their lives as students?
This article, although it speaks of the Undergraduate Degree seeking students, made some interesting points about the ways that students actually want to use technology. Brought to you be Edudemic, a website that attempts to connect education and technology for the growing student population. Do students prefer to use email conversations instead of face-to-face conversations with the professor? Lets find out.
I work in an academic library in a small 2-year campus and see how important technology is to our students. Most of our students walk around while texting or reading a text on the cell phones. They are used to instant results and are often frustrated when the research databases are down and they can’t find an article for a class which is due tomorrow. Most of our students do have laptops, but there still are some who check out laptops from our library. This is a must for them as they either write their papers from their laptops with wireless connection throughout campus, or they use them at home to connect with our online resources. I believe that more of our students take advantage of in classroom classes vs. online when they can as they are coming from small high schools and need more assurance of the face-to-face class with professor. They do prefer to use their devices to communicate with friends via Facebook or other social media, rather than using campus email. Our campus has a Facebook page, but I’m not sure of the % who use it. Because they are used to instant results, they have difficulty accepting the printer not cooperating or the online databases not coming up immediately.