Although technology does make a good portion of high school easier, are we relying on computers too much? A majority of assignments, projects, quizzes and tests are done on computers now.

I don’t remember the last time when all I needed to get through the school day was some paper and a pencil.

The first problem with the excessive amount of technology is computer screens tend to be easily distracting to students. Students are so dependent on social media and the internet, it only makes sense to check their Snapchat instead of writing that boring essay.

On multiple occasions, I’ve seen my peers playing video games, watching a movie, surfing the internet etc., instead of doing their classwork.

Furthermore, it’s just as easy to cheat—it’s shockingly easy to find answers to everything on the internet.

Also, in a study published in Psychological Science, Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Pam A. Mueller compared note-taking by hand versus by computer to see how it affects learning and memory. Studies showed that students typing tend to copy lectures verbatim when students writing long hand paraphrase, choosing the most important information to copy.

This benefited the handwriting students greatly because students process the information better, thinking about the most significant part of the lesson, and in the end have less to look back on. The more words the students copied verbatim, the worse they performed on recall tests.

Personally, I have always benefited from taking notes by hand.

My opinion, use technology for obvious reasons like research. But don’t completely forget about the old-fashioned pen and paper.