Do your students know more about technology than you do?

I ran across the following article today while I was trying to get ahead on my grad school class for technology leadership. The article asks if your students know more about technology than you do.

The answer is no. No they don't.

I know many a teacher who thinks they do. And don't get me wrong - my students know how to download flappy birds with the best of them. They are wonderful at navigating their iPhones and their Androids. Most of them know how to navigate Power Point well enough to put together a presentation on chapter four, which they will then recite back to the class. But two things are happening today; one, is that teachers are overestimating the tech skills of students, and two, they are underestimating their own knowledge of technology.

I am forever coming across students who don't know how to do basic, simple things. Like save their work. I have not done extensive research on this particular topic; all my evidence is anecdotal. I've been teaching for four years, and helped my previous school go one to one. I am generally referred to as "the technology lady" on campus, despite it being currently nowhere in my job description.  I do push for using technology in the classroom, and my fellow teachers often both admire and fear the things I'll attempt with my students in the computer lab. So I do have quite a bit of anecdotal evidence at my disposal.

Amongst other things, I had to have a very lengthy lesson in my mathematics class about networks, when I found that my students were saving their homework to their student directory - housed on the school servers and unavailable off campus - and then claiming that it "disappeared" when they got home. This was about halfway through the year, and students had been having these problems for months without being able to figure out why sometimes they could see their homework, and sometimes they couldn't.

I had to teach several students how to save in Microsoft Word. To be fair, this is what the student saw.

Just an icon. No file menu.

The "save" icon is easily recognizable to anyone who was around in the 90s as a 3.5" floppy disk. But  the child in question was born in 1998. He had never used a 3.5" floppy disk. How could he recognize it and associate it with saving a file?

When we went one to one at my last school, I showed my students the website for typer shark. Most of them could not type, because there was no requirement for a keyboarding class in my district. When they would get an assignment for an essay in English class, at least part of their trepidation was that it would take them "forever" to type it out. I allowed and encouraged them to play typer shark after they had completed their work, and gave extra credit to those who could pass a 20 wpm typing test. Remember, I taught math.

So what's my point? We can't expect students to know things that they have never been taught. I've never seen a student make a "stupid mistake" on the computer. I've seen students make lots of mistakes because they have a very superficial understanding about computing and how it works. Most students lack basic computing skills when it comes to working on a desktop. Because they've never been taught. 

I, on the other hand, like many of my teaching cohorts graduated from high school just after the turn of the century. Going to school in the 90s meant computer lab every other week in elementary school. It meant typing class required for every 7th grader. It meant growing up with technology; not just growing up having technology, but living in a time period where the complexity of home computing was increasing as my understanding of computing kept pace. I recognize the 3.5" floppy, because I remember switching disks as I played The Secret of Monkey Island.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

How these kids understand the intricacies of the app store, I understood the desktop. You know more than you think you do. 

Consider this - some of my students have difficulty using a mouse because they are so used to a touch screen. They don't know how to edit things in word; how to make things bold or that they should use italics when they would underline the title of a book on paper. They don't know what RAM is, or a hard drive. They have no idea what a spreadsheet is, or a database.  They've never installed anything from a disk, or sometimes even a CD-rom. They have never known a world before Windows. They've no understanding of the idea that folders were once a revolutionary thing, and that computers didn't used to have mice. The idea of a text only video game like Zork would sound like a waste of time. When something doesn't work right away, they've no idea how to troubleshoot. They type entire questions into the Google search bar and are frustrated when the computer doesn't understand English. Because they do not understand technology.  

But by god, are they good at flappy bird.

References

Click on the blue square thing. (2010, March 28). Retrieved February 3, 2014, from 
     http://my.dlma.com/2010/03/28/click-on-the-blue-square-thing/ 

Guybrush [Photograph]. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.thesixthaxis.com/wp-content/

     uploads/2013/01/guybrush.jpg

Hudson, H. T. (n.d.). Do your students know more about technology than you do? Retrieved 

     February 3, 2014, from http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/do-your-students-

     know-more-about-technology-you-do

Word save icon [Image]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://my.dlma.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/     03/word_save_icon.jpg