The impact of technology on children's education

Effects on children

Technology base educational videos and games are being integrated into the lives and classrooms of new generations. These videos and games are meant to be used as tools to help growing minds develop, and to increase knowledge and awareness. Videos such as Baby Einsteins line of infant DVDs are a topic of conflicting interest, according to the University of Washington study of infant vocabulary is slipping due to educational baby DVDs.
Published in the Journal of Pediatrics, a 2007 University of Washington study on the vocabulary of babies surveyed over 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota. the study found that for every one hour that babies 8–16 months of age watched DVDs and Videos they knew 6-8 fewer 90 common baby words than the babies that did not watch them. Andrew Meltzoff, Ph.D, a surveyor in this study states that the result makes sense, that if the baby's 'alert time' is spent in front of DVDs and TV, instead of with people speaking, the babies are not going to get the same linguistic experience. Dr. Dimitri Chistakis, another surveyor reported that the evidence is mounting that baby DVDs are of no value and may be harmful.
The digital revolution hit generation z, also known as the digital generation of youth with a new way of interacting with the world and with their own identities. Social networking websites, such as Facebook are tools by witch the digital generation as a means of assessing their culture. Michel Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the center on Media and Child Health in Boston said of the digital generation, "Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task, but for jumping to the next thing, and the side effects could linger:the worry is we're raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently."

[edit] Neurological changes

Angelika Dimoka, Director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University in Philadelphia pronounced, "With too much information, people's decision;s make less and less sense." Neurological differences shape the brain of youth, reading and writing are taking a back seat to scrolling and clicking, 80% of families did not buy or read a book in 2007. ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) has been linked to prolonged exposure of abundant information, 15% of elementary students are on psychotropic medications and by college, 40% of students are taking prescribed medicine. fMRIscans revealed that activity in the dorsolateral prefrotal cortex(a region behind the forehead responsible for decision making and emotional control) increased as information was added to a decision until it reached a critical mass and cognitive overload when the activity abruptly subsided.