AP Psychology teacher, Bill James, allows his students to use their phones during class which gives students the option to participate in texting polls.

He originally was going to use twitter and take polls that way but many of the students said they didn’t have accounts or did not like the fact that it was not anonymous.

The texting polls give the students anonymity, therefore, the majority of students participate.

During the past couple of years, technology in classrooms has improved significantly. Schools use to use only text books and small blackboards. Schools themselves weren’t even that big then.

Now, schools have dozens of classrooms, hundreds of students, televisions in every room, and growing in popularity, smart boards.

Both students and teachers, agree that there are positive and negative aspects to so much technology with in the classrooms.

According to learningpartnership.org the internet alone took only four years to reach an audience of 50 million people when radio broadcasting took 38 years.

The Internet allows schools to play movies and short video clips right offline, for educational purposesof course.

Senior Shelley Nickerson moved here from Toronto, Canada, last year and said that the schools in Michigan are much more technology advanced.

In Toronto, the schools did not use smart boards and the only televisions they had were the little ones on the carts that wheel around.

“When I moved here last year it seemed like everything was so high tech. I grew use to it though, and now I like it.” She stated, “[I like] The smart boards primarily because they are really cool, but also because they help capture different ways of learning.”

Nickerson said smart boards are efficient with the visual learning, displaying pictures or playing videos.

Over the years, James found that before schools were the ones to have the upper hand in technology by having multiple televisions and computers but recently it has switched.

People have way more technology than the schools do with cellphones, televisions, computers, iPod’s etc.

The schools are finally catching up somewhat and not having so many restrictions against technology, such as having phones out during school or websites restrictions like facebook and twitter.

Since 2008, Public schools reported providing various technology devices for instruction, including LCD (liquid crystal display) and DLP (digital light processing) projectors (97 percent), digital cameras (93 percent), and interactive whiteboards (73 percent).

“I think technology has made learning more interesting and more fun for everyone,” James stated. “It teaches the students to have responsibility and having technology in the classrooms is more like the real world.”