Following the recent announcement of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education ( KCSE) results by the Education Cabinet Secretary Professor Jacob Kaimenyi, it is clear that the performance in English paper is drastically dropping every day.
In his statement Prof. Kaimenyi said that the use of gadgets have led to the poor performance in schools since the gadgets have done away with the need for a user to know the spellings. This is because they offer predictive text capabilities and spell check options.
In this digital age, we cannot dismiss the use of technology since these gadgets are the ones that give us up to date information on what is happening around us.
The use of SMS and social media are to be blamed for poor spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. This is due to the character limit for an SMS which is 160 characters per message. Thus the users are forced to shorten words, or use Emoji images. The continued use of twitter whose character limit is 140 characters reduces the number of character per tweet.
The truth is that the students are not stupid and they know the spellings but they are used to the “textspeak” and shortening of words. During exams they forget and use the “textspeak” in the papers since they are used to it.
To some extent, technology has led to the fading away of the reading culture in students. Students don’t have to go through volumes of book to research for something. They only need to Google what they want. This can lead to Intellectual laziness since there is no room for contemplation and concentration.
Technology makes us absorb more and diverse information. A quick look at your twitter feeds or face book page, keeps you up to date with the current information from all over the world.
Technology has lead people to be dependent on it. If you ask someone a question, the first answer they will give you is “just Google it” instead of trying to retrieve what is on the memory.
Technology is good and the benefits we get from it are massive. We should understand that we are the ones controlling this gadgets and stop blaming the gadgets since we are the ones controlling them. In conclusion let us make proper use of the available gadgets to improve our lives.
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