Think Digital Native Means Digitally Literate? Think Again.
Aigner Picou, a program director on the Learning Agency Lab, spent a variety of time speaking to academics in 2020. She was a part of a group researching the way to construct a greater writing suggestions instrument. Think of applications that may mechanically generate solutions or scores for college students based mostly on their writing.
During these conversations, Picou began listening to academics describe the identical problem over and over. No matter what grade degree they taught in center or highschool, academics had college students who struggled to make use of a digital studying platform or to kind with out painstaking hunt-and-pecking on the keyboard.
“It actually was such a frequent comment that I started asking the question if teachers didn’t bring it up,” Picou says. “We assume that students are digitally fluent because there’s way more technology around us than ever before. At the same time, when it comes to typing or using a platform in the learning context, a lot of times students aren’t receiving any sort of formal computer-skills training.”
Picou says it’s time to dispose of the misunderstanding that college students will grasp tech instruments just because they’re rising up in a digital age. And that has modified how her personal group thinks in regards to the design of an algorithm they’ve developed.
“Tools just needed to be way more user-friendly than they were,” Picou says. “They have to be engaging—and really so easy for students to access and use, and for teachers as well.”
Engagement Matters
It seems that college students do have digital abilities, however not essentially the digital literacy they should do their schoolwork. Sometimes what they know from utilizing client websites switch—like Zoom, for example—however not at all times.
“Sometimes it’s not even that actual writing process that’s causing students the challenge. It’s the time that it takes for them to type on a keyboard because they’re not used to five-finger typing,” Picou says. “Some [teachers] have students who have written full essays on their phones.”
There’s a distinction in the way in which college students use a tool to scroll via YouTube movies versus understanding the knowledge delivered in a lesson, Picou provides. The first is passive, and the opposite requires cautious engagement.
One trainer operating an asynchronous class reported that some college students did fantastic till it was time for a quiz, the place they’d rating a zero.
Students might imagine they will scroll via and skim a query for a take a look at or quiz rapidly, as they do with different instruments, Picou says. “It’s almost like the way I would scroll through Instagram.”
That’s one thing that Josh Flaherty can attest to in his classroom at Community Lab School, a part of the Albemarle County Public Schools system in Virginia. In addition to serving as the highschool’s lead trainer and IB coordinator, he teaches math.
“This idea that kids, especially high-school-age kids, are digital natives and can easily learn digital tools, that’s largely not borne out by evidence,” Flaherty says. Yes, they will play video video games or use social media, he provides, “but they’re not necessarily good at things they’re not familiar with.”
Flaherty says college students are keen to determine issues that pop up with studying platforms on their very own. When the pandemic pushed lessons on-line, he says, they found out the way to group chat on Zoom with associates who had been in numerous lessons. But that degree of dedication solely transfers to classes in the event that they’re within the subject.
His college district has a one-to-one system coverage, so college students get a laptop computer on the primary day of faculty as soon as they enter sixth grade. Even with that increase to college students’ digital literacy, he nonetheless steers away from any tech instrument that requires a variety of orientation upfront. Flaherty says college students want a low bar to entry to allow them to dive proper into the exercise.
“The more front-loading you have, the more interest you have to have,” Flaherty says. “That’s where the teaching comes in, designing activities that are interesting to them—that have a place for student voice and student choice.”
Helping Teachers Help Students
In the International Literacy Association’s “What’s Hot in Literacy” report revealed in 2020, 49 p.c of literacy professionals stated they wished extra skilled growth on “using digital resources to support literacy instruction.” That shocked the researchers, who additionally reported that professionals had been break up over whether or not digital literacy was receiving the suitable quantity of consideration: 26 p.c felt it deserved much less consideration, whereas 25 p.c felt it ought to get extra.
For her half, Picou says her conversations with educators present {that a} digital instrument’s usefulness goes past the interface. After all, there’s no worth in giving suggestions on writing if college students can’t perceive it.
One of the significantly decided academics Picou spoke to tried out a writing platform that gave customers no grading rubric. The trainer went via 90 revisions earlier than she bought an ideal rating.
A key query to ask, Picou says, is How does the instrument reply to college students? “If they’re working in this tool that has a score, and there’s no explanation on how to get a higher score, it can be super demotivating.”
