My time in secondary school remained the most memorable in my students life. That was the period that mobile telecommunication penetrated the country.
As a student in secondary school, I didn't own a phone. In those days, phones were affordable to the upper class of society. Buying a phone in some instances wasn't even the problem because the cost of a SIM card was more than that of a phone.
Students of that period suffered for unavailability of mobile telecommunication. I didn't see it as suffering then, not until years later when I began to realize what I missed as a student.
I went to school in a town that was about one hour away from home by road. The mode of communication between my parents and I was through letters. This channel of communication could be frustrating sometimes. An urgent issue could suffer the required intervention if the letter didn't get to the recipient on time.
I once sent a letter to my mum and the driver that I sent changed his mind from traveling the day he had planned to. I suffered for it because what I was lacking then was foodstuffs. Imagine it was now, I would just put a call across and the following day, I could get what I needed from my parents.
Another good thing that came with the wide coverage of internet services is access to information.
Back in the days, the mainly available access to information was the television and radio. I believe we all know the limitations of these media when we need to search for some information. We live in a time now that almost every information that we need is a click away from us. Google and other search engines are there to provide solutions to our problems. If well utilized, this serves as a huge academic resource to the present crop of students.
This reminds me of one experience that I had during my days as a geography student in secondary school. We were given an assignment that required consulting textbooks. I didn't have a geography textbook. It took me a lot of stress to get hold of one to do the assignment. It was on a weekend and the idea of consulting the school library wasn't feasible. If it were today, searching for information about the question on the internet would guide me to solve it.
The coming of the internet and mobile telecommunication has its negative side too.
When I started talking of the merits above, I put a clause, "If well utilized." Many students now are using the internet and phones for the wrong purpose.
When I was teaching in a secondary school, a colleague of mine who was an English teacher once gave me some letters written by his students. I went through the letters and I saw different cases of chatting abbreviations creeping in to how the students spelled some words. You see words like "and" spelt as "n." "You" spelt as "u." "For" spelt as "4." These are the wrong influences of social media chatting.
The reading habits of many students has also reduced due to too much time spent on the internet. It has also exposed the young population to some vices such as internet fraud.
In order to solve this challenge, students should be monitored in the way they make use of the internet. Their accessibility to phones should be under control. Students in primary and secondary schools shouldn't be given unfettered access to phones. They can be given tablets whose usage is under some restrictions.
With this measure, the students will gain maximally from the unlimited resources on the internet.