Introduction to the topic

    Technologies have become an essential part of today’s society. People use them for communication, entertainment, learning, etc. A great amount of people who uses technologies everyday are teenagers. They are extremely familiar with tech products such as computers, gaming systems, etc. As teenagers’ time spent on tech products increases, a question arises: will these tech products influence teenagers positively or negatively in their school performance?

    Researches have been done as early as in the 80s to find the relationship between school performances and technology use. However the debate still continues today, where some say there are more pros than cons and the others say otherwise.

    For instance, in psychology, the term “reinforcement” means the process of an event strengthens or increases the probability of the response that it follows. Using technology for school work is more convenient and more fun (which is agreed by large amount of people, as concluded from many large surveys, such as the NetDay Speak Up 2005 Survey), which can act as the reinforcement that encourages students to use technology more. However, not all of the students will be positively influenced because the results are also dependant on the situations, and in this case, tech products may or may not yield a positive result.

Purpose of this site

    The purpose of this site is to prove the following hypothesis, using the data collected from the school I currently go to:

Technologies that are commonly used by teenagers will have a positive impact on students’ school performance.

    Personally I believe that there are more pros to cons in the use of technologies, especially in school performances. Technology can create a unique environment for each student. Researches have shown that no two children learn in the same way. Since the internet has an unlimited amount of resources, it also has many different kinds of environments, which allows students to find one where they learn the most.