Our "Technology Generation"

Last week I assigned my first big project, one that everyone is familiar with: the book report. We are reading "Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" and we are far enough through that I thought they could use more of their time writing. I figured the process was easy enough. I'll create some guidelines, hand them out and some kind of rubric so students know the expectation. I tend to hate rubrics, but I have found that being a student teacher means tailoring your teaching methods to fit snugly with your cooperating teacher - it helps all parties involved and I am totally ok with it. Anyway, the rubric was in an outline form and the students responded well to it. Actually, I started to assign the project without a rubric and made one upon popular request (read: student feedback and formative assessment).

There were, of course, some kinks. For instance I wanted students to tell me the genre of the novel they are reading. The form looked something like:

1. Genre

           What kind of novel is this?

This was interpreted a few ways like, "This was a sad novel...", which led me to believe I had missed the mark on our multiple talks of genre and my explicitly telling them the novels genre is historical fiction on many occasions. "That's just how it is sometimes." my cooperating teacher remarked of my concerns, "I think they should know what genre means at this point, some of them were just a bit confused by the prompt I guess." Those kinks on the outlined rubric aside, I found the hardest part of this project was the computer lab.

The computer lab started as this shining beacon of hope for me, and in my excitement we rushed over there to begin working on their book reports. "Thou shalt type up thine report according to thy outlined format and humbly submit it to me at the closing of the second class period." I said. And at the end of the first class period my students, nearly in unison, replied, "Would that we could Sire, but our school folder confounds us." And to my dismay they continued, "And thine email hath been forgotten by a score of us, nor do we knoweth our own email addresses, nor can we attach files. Our work today is for naught." And so it was that I discovered many of my students were technologically illiterate in an academic sense.

I think we assume too much about what students know about technology. Out of curiosity I looked up some information available about teens computer and media usage. Common knowledge would hold that teens are all tech heads, but studies show that teens browse the internet about 2x less than the average adult with the focus being on general search engines and social media. So they use technology in very limited ways, and unlike adults, teens are not forced to use the business side of technology - which is a literacy in and of itself.

My assumption was that students would understand how to save files in specific formats and know how to email with attachments. I also over estimated the number of students who would have access to a computer at home. Now, instead of this project being done in two class periods in the computer lab and at home, it has taken about a week. Our students aren't simply technologically literate because they grew up with it like people often assume. Computer skills are learned, like anything else.

Technology isn't second nature for this generation.

Realizations are easy to come by when student teaching, I have been finding, and after this project I realized that I went into this to be an English teacher, but I just became a computer teacher as well. I guess it's all just literacy anyway, right?