Technology: What are Students Exposed To? By: C.L.

This article was written y a member of Kaplan High's Journalism Club.
Over the years, Kaplan High School’s technology has advanced at an excellent pace. The seniors of today are very proud of the school’s accomplishment. One of these advances is the new Promethean boards, which have replaced the old Expo Marker boards. Promethean boards are able to hook up directly to a teacher’s computer, allowing the board to become an overhead projector. Also, the board comes equipped with a special stylus that allows its user to use the computer from the board as well as able to draw shapes and other things on the board. The board requires you to calibrate the stylus to the board, first. While the calibration process is fairly easy, that does not necessarily mean that it will work every time. In some cases at Kaplan High, the calibrating system has made it worse, making it difficult to draw even a simple circle.
Teachers and students have two completely different views on technology when it comes to the internet: The teachers try to find what to and what to not block from the students, while the students find loopholes in the teachers’ security programs. As of now, the teachers have been able to stomp out many of the ways that students have been able to gain access to restricted websites, but students are still coming up with ways around those. For example, students used to use “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)” to gain access to restricted websites. When HTTPS would not work for the website, students used proxies, which allow the user to enter a website through the proxy instead of going to the website directly. Teachers finally came up with an ultimate solution to this problem: Disable the use of HTTPS. Without HTTPS usage, accessing restricted websites and using proxies are no longer an option. While this may sound like a permanent solution, some students are designing programs at home that allow them to bypass the system’s security through the use of portable devices, or saving the program to a thumb drive or flash drive and using the program on a school’s computer.
If students would focus on using technology more for gaining knowledge rather than finding ways through security, one would believe that a high school student would be able to learn far faster and greater knowledge than one who would not use them for just fun. While technology is a great modern feature, many students “use and abuse” it, and thus technology loses its true worth.