Over the last 15 years, society has been introduced to a vast number of technological innovations that have made our lives easier and made previous inventions obsolete.

Our generation has witnessed the rise of social media, GPS, smartphones and tablets that can entertain us, help us study and find out how late Starbucks is open.

We have benefitted immensely from this new wave of innovation. Even something as simple as pen and paper seems arbitrary when you can type it out on your phone or create it in Microsoft Word using a laptop.

So why has the use of this technology in the classroom been only slightly incremental?

Many professors prohibit the use of smartphones, tablets and even laptops during class time.

Yet nearly all of them require their students to submit their assignments on Blackboard, which demands you utilize the very technology they outlaw in their classrooms.

We even have online classes, the sole purpose of which is so we can bypass an in-person lecture by using the devices that a majority of people in the country have.

We should be embracing the benefits of innovation and not discouraging the use of it. We now have access to a wealth of information that our predecessors did not, and it can come to us at the tip of our fingers.

Yes, there are downsides to being able to search anything you want, especially if you should be listening to a lecture in class, but students would be more engaged in a discussion or lecture if they had the ability to access a tool or information to help them better understand the material.

We are held back by our inability to accept the advancements we have worked hard to invent and learn.

We shouldn’t have to search through a textbook to find the answer to a question we can find in 10 seconds with a simple Google search.

Smartphones and tablets and laptops were created to make our lives easier, it’s baffling as to why we don’t let it.

We have the technology. We should use it.