San Francisco is considered to be a global technological capital, but even here, secondary students are shocking poorly equipped to survive the modern digital age. The school where I teach the sciences is nestled in the historic district of the Mission of San Francisco, a few kilometers from the sprawl campuses of X, Meta and Google. During the pandemic, our district embodied this technological identity by providing chromebooks and hot spots so that all students become fully distant during a whole academic year of virtual learning.
When I started my career in class in 2021, I expected my school to embody the same technological identity that I observed at the district level. To my surprise, I was shocked by the low levels of technology and internet technology of my students. Over the past three years, I have seen the shortcomings of my students in knowledge concerning the use of the Internet and other basic digital skills as a serious and neglected problem. Not only does this prevent them from engaging with daily lessons and activities in high school, but also exacerbate and re-hundred the existing disparities.
When I compare the experiences I have with the students of my class to the stories that I hear from colleagues and parents in neighboring neighborhoods with more wealth and wealth, it is clear to me that this problem of low technology literacy is a generational problem, this disproportionately affects black, Latin-Latin-Latin-American, more branching off the results of these students and families beyond high school.
As a physics teacher, I am supposed to teach the laws of Newton’s movement and the functioning of electricity. Unfortunately, the difficulties of my students while browsing the essential functions of the Chromebook hindered the content. I fight with the class time that I should devote to the development of these crucial skills in relation to scientific practices and ideas that I am obliged and trained to teach.
To correct the ship, families, schools and future employers must work together to prioritize a significant investment and an approach based on evidence to develop a diversified and technically qualified workforce which can prosper in a rapidly evolving economic landscape.
As a student, part of my schooling concerned library lessons, computer courses and English lessons, during which I received dedicated teaching time using Mozilla Firefox and Google to do research for school projects. We were taught not to afflict and cite our sources. I have never completely memorized how to create a quote in MLA format, but I learned to use several websites that have generated quotes by clicking on a button.
Thanks to this and the management of my parents at home, I learned a skill that now seems to me innate. The effective use of the Internet as a learning tool forces you to formulate a question or use keywords to click on and assess several search results until you find something that is both reliable and relevant to your question. Before these tools, like all those who frequented school before the internet would attest to it with pleasure, finding specific information has taken much more time and efforts – and generally involved a trip to the library. With the omnipresence of Google, all our questions about the world have become responsible in a few minutes.
When I gave one of my first assessments to a 10th year physics class in 2022, one of the questions was an image of a graph with a line that said: “Find the slope of this line.” The right answer was two, and we examined this subject the day before and the weeks before. While I classify this question, I found five different articles of students in different class periods that had an identical answer:
“This slope calculator resolves for the parameters involving the slope and the equation of a line.”
I was perplexed during the first answer because he belonged to a student who had recently immigrated and identified as a learner in English. By the second answer, I achieved with a feeling of dread and fun what had happened and confirmed my suspicions by googling the words: Find the slope of this line. Rather than calculating the real answer to the problem, my students rather copied the text.
While September turned around October and spent more time in class, I also noticed that my students rarely used Google for their questions. When they finished an individual work or were invited to use an article of a page to find a definition of a word of physical vocabulary, I heard a disjointed choir of “Hey, Siri!” As I circulated throughout the room to help. I laughed the first time I heard it and I started students asking why it was their approach. My amusement quickly dissipated when I recognized a clear scheme in their response. The vocal research approach was mainly adopted by low -color students who did not have their parents at home to help them during the day for their virtual learning year. The act of typing a question and click on several results to find an appropriate answer had become too heavy for many of these 15 -year -old children.
Troubleshooting
In my past courses and corporate jobsThe most precious skill I learned to succeed in these roles was the possibility of understanding how to navigate in different digital tools and platforms using troubleshooting, trials and errors and the Internet. From Slack to Matlab to software interfaces of specific products and companies, click and try things, and read Wiki-Momment articles, I developed a skill in the tools I had to use to support my work in my daily role.
My current students, who grew up by scrolling on a touch screen and engaging with the user interfaces of the app, have no innate knowledge about how to navigate things like text processing, slide presentations or other digital applications like Microsoft Excel. There was perhaps an assumption that, like one or two generations like mine were taught to these skills, the next one would naturally adapt to it. However, my second year secondary students find it difficult to format text, make a copy of a Google Doc, or even take and insert a screenshot. The “file”, “modify”, “see”, “insert”, “format” and “helping menus can also be stickers.
Last year, I had a black student who was rarely in class but determined to graduate to play sports at university. He would finish missing work by copying Google search results in hand for any question or problem during an assignment, leading to mystifying answers which were often far from the base of the lesson. In my class, I often see emerging multilingual students using their phones or chromebooks to take text photos and receive automatic text translation on their devices.
Although these strategies can help them finish a particular assignment, in this context, they use technology as a substitute for their learning instead of a conduit. In other words, while the heirs of the elite of Silicon Valley Tech gain control of the use of computers and AI models as thought partners and digital assistants, without direct instruction or direct modeling at school, students that I teach develop a dependence on technology to reflect for them.
The future of work
He already has the impression that we have missed the brand to teach students how to navigate existing technologies that would prepare for marginalized and underworld students for success, stability and life gain opportunities in our current digital workforce. With the sudden proliferation of AI models and the changes that have resulted in industry and new businesses, I am always in difficulty with how much I should continue to underline the development of these skills that I learned when I was at school. I wonder if we, teachers, must invest time and efforts in them, or if it would be better to jump and try to keep up with the way in which richer schools are starting to train students to be qualified users of emerging technologies.
Although the primary objective of public education in the United States is not well defined, the Mission statement of the Federal Department of Education Affirms that he is supposed to “promote the performance and preparation of students for global competitiveness by promoting excellence in education and ensuring equal access”.
In schools like mine, preparation for global competitiveness and the guarantee of equal access would imply a strategy at the level of the school or the district to integrate modern digital tools. Instead, the most abundant or most difficult students are supposed to navigate in class search engines and the google Internet to support their class learning, but are often not equipped.
Filling the current gap of technology and digital literacy among rich and educated families and those of the families of my students are essential. Even if my mainly black, Latinos and immigrant students had to be selected to attend the same elite colleges as young people from neighboring neighborhoods, they would go to campus in disadvantage. Schools, districts and community organizations that serve the most marginalized and under-strengthened students should collaborate to prioritize an avant-garde approach and responsible for the integration of new digital literature and new skills in the educational program and the structure of learning public schools.
As schools, universities, entrepreneurs, governments and employers from all sectors for the unknown scale of changes on the horizon with AI, students and their families should demand that they have the possibility of effectively developing these new powerful digital tools.
