Journal 7

Think about your own education. At what grade level did you first encounter computers, CD-ROMs, computer games, or the Internet at school or in your classroom?

Journal 7

I believed I was in the second grade when I first played on a computer.  It was a Macintosh and it was very bulky.  I remember thinking that I was so cool because I had a computer.  Everything was new to me and I was so amazed at what computer could do.  At school we did not have access to computers until fifth grade.  Even then, we had one computer in our classroom and we had to take turns using it.  We had to collect a certain amount of points based on behavior in order to use the computer for five minutes.  The games that we could play on the computer were very educational and one was to help us improve our typing skills.    We did not get to use the internet at school and at home until maybe three years after we had gotten our computer. We then had computer labs with about ten computers in computer labs.  We were allowed to see the internet to find information on research papers that we had to complete for class.  We had many websites blocked and we could only use websites that were relevant to finding information for school. It wasn’t until we went to high school that we started having computer classes that taught us how to use varies computer programs that were essential for our success in the real world.  Technology has had so many advances within the past decades.  Nowadays, students have access to pretty much anything on the internet.  You can even find personal information about people.  At schools there are several computer labs with enough computers for an entire class of students.  Teachers no longer have to split their classes to fit the capacity of the labs.  Al students get the same opportunity to use the computers and the internet.