Study Finds that Students Are the Digital Advance Team
If you’ve ever had a technology failure in your classroom, you know that your best resources can be your students. When the DVD player spins and blinks, but doesn’t play, a half dozen students will volunteer to fix it. If your presentation file becomes corrupted, chances are you have a guru sitting in the front row who can open it and save your lesson plan.
Students as technology guides. The latest research proves what you already know: our students are digital experts. Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up National Research Project has interviewed 281,000 K12 students in all 50 states for its latest report “Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” The researchers call our students the Digital Advance Team. These students are an asset to adults, especially those whose job is to plan these kids’ education and prepare them for 21st century jobs.
Our students use technology for four purposes: communication, collaboration, creation, and contribution. The researchers write that educators need to rely on students demonstrate how to use technology and adapt it to educational purposes. Students are early adopters of new technology and they become the technology trendsetters for their peers, adults, and teachers.
Students feel unprepared for the future. In their survey of students in grades 6 – 12, the researchers found that only one-third of our students think teachers are preparing them for future jobs. However, 56 percent of principals think that their students are prepared for the technological world of work.
Why is there such a disconnect between what principals perceive and what students think? These trendsetters, our students, are frustrated with us and our schools. When they open up the double-doors and cross from the real world into the educational world, students know that they must power down their electronic devices and sit in classrooms more adapted for the 20th century than the 21st century.
Forty-three percent of the students surveyed reported that their school’s firewalls or content filters block their access to online materials and impede their learning. Over one-third of students report that teachers block their access to technology for learning. School rules frustrate one-quarter of our students and their access to technology. Outside of the school walls, students communicate freely with e-mail, text messages, and instant messages, but inside the school one-third of these students can’t communicate about learning with any electronic means.
Clear the way for technology. When the researchers asked students how schools could make it easier for them to work electronically, the number one response was: Let me use my own devices and tools during the school day.
As educators, we know that the problem with letting students use their own electronic devices during the school day is that not every student will have equal access to the learning tools. Some kids might have a smart phone that allows them to search for answers on the Internet, others might not have any electronic devices at all.
If given the chance, though, 53 percent of middle and high school students report that they would use their mobile devices to communicate with their peers about school work. Thirty-four percent would use e-mail, text messages, or instant messages to communicate with their teachers.
Both administrators and teachers believe that incorporating mobile electronic devices into the classroom would benefit students and increase student engagement, even beyond the school day.
Recommendations. The researchers recommend that schools find a way to allow students to use their own technology during the school day and to meet learners in the digital world where they live. Their research indicates that teachers should move more of their curriculum online and incorporate learning tools like simulations and games into their lesson plans. Students use Web 2.0 tools and collaborate with one another outside of the classroom; our lessons should take advantage of this and allow students to work with one another online to create new content. Schools need more digital resources available in the classroom so students can use the technology in a learning context. Teachers and students should take advantage of the instructional technology to connect with experts and bring their experiences into the classroom.
Above all, though, the researchers recommend that we let our students be our technological guides.
“We recommend that as policy makers move forward, we listen to the stakeholders with the most skin in the game – the students themselves,” the researchers wrote. “To listen, observe and learn about how they are approaching learning and living every day, their frustration points with their schools, the challenges they face in learning in the 21st century and their aspirations for how schools can be improved so all students will be successful.”
Reference:
“Selected National Findings: Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” (2009.) Project Tomorrow. http://www.tomorrow.org Accessed December 8, 2009.
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