San Francisco is considered global high-tech capital, but once again, high school students are surprisingly unequipped to survive in the modern digital age. The school I teach science is located in San Francisco’s historic mission district, just a few miles from the vast campuses of X, Meta and Google. During the pandemic, our district embodied this pre-tech identity by providing Chromebooks and hotspots to ensure that all students go completely remotely throughout the virtual learning year of their grade.
When I began my classroom career in 2021, I was hoping that the school would embody the same technical identity that it observed at the district level. To my surprise, I was shocked by the low level of technology and internet literacy in my students. Over the past three years I have seen gaps in knowledge about internet use and other basic digital skills as serious and overlooked issues. Not only does it prevent you from being involved in daily lessons and activities in high school; We will exacerbate existing disparities and re-enter them.
Comparing experiences with classroom students with stories we hear from colleagues and parents in our neighborhoods with more wealth and wealth, it is clear that this low-tech literacy issue is a generational issue, but disproportionately affects Black, Latino and immigrant students. More divergent results for these students and families beyond high school.
As a physics teacher, I am supposed to teach Newton’s laws of movement and how electricity works. Unfortunately, my student’s struggles when navigating Essential Chromebook functions get in the way of content. I struggle with developing these important skills and how much time I need to focus on my lesson hours when I am mandated and trained to teach science practices and ideas.
To get the ship right, families, schools and future employers need to work together to prioritize meaningful investment and evidence-based approaches in developing a diverse, technically skilled workforce that can thrive in rapidly changing economic conditions.
Google IT
As a student, some of my schooling included library classes, computer classes and English classes, during which I received my dedicated teaching hours using Mozilla Firefox and Google and conducted research on school projects. We were not plagiarized and were taught to cite sources. I never fully remembered how to create quotes in MLA format, but I learned how to use several websites that generated quotes when I clicked the button.
Through this and teaching my parents at home, I have now learned skills that seem natural to me. To effectively use the Internet as a tool for learning, you must either formulate a question or use keywords to click and evaluate multiple search results until you find something reliable and relevant to the question. Before these tools, finding specific information took much more time and effort, usually involves travelling to the library, as anyone who attended school before the age of the internet would be happy to prove. Google’s ubiquity has made all our questions about the world answerable in minutes.
When I made one of my first assessments to the 10th Grade Physics class in 2022, one of the questions was a photograph of the line graph, “Find the gradient of this line.” The correct answer is 2, and I reviewed this topic a day and a few weeks ago. While scoring this question, I found five different student papers over various class periods that had the same answer.
“This slope calculator resolves parameters that contain slope and line equations.”
I was confused by the first answer as I was a student I recently migrated and identified as an English learner. The second answer made me realize what happened with a sense of fear and entertainment, and Google the words to confirm my doubts. Find the slope of this line. Instead of calculating the actual answer to the problem, my students copied the text instead.
September has changed to October and I have spent more time in the classroom, so I also realized that students are not using Google for their questions. When asked to use a one-page article to find out whether they have completed their individual tasks or to find definitions of physics vocabulary, I heard the scattered chorus of “Hey, Siri!” I circulated the room and helped me. I laughed first when I heard it and attracted the students by asking why it was their approach. I recognized a clear pattern in their reaction, so my entertainment quickly dissipated. The voice search approach was primarily adopted by low-income students who were not supporting their parents at home for half of their year and a half of their virtual learning. The act of entering a question and clicking on some results to find the right answer was too troublesome for many of these 15-year-olds.
troubleshooting
In my past internships and corporate jobs, the most valuable skills I learned to succeed in these roles were troubleshooting, trial and error, and the ability to figure out how to navigate a variety of digital tools and platforms with the help of the Internet. From reading the software interfaces of Slack to Matlab, specific product and company, clicks and trials, and Wiki-how articles, I became proficient with tools that were expected to be used to support my work in everyday roles.
My current student, who grew up scrolling on the touchscreen and involved in the app user interface, has no innate knowledge of how to navigate things like word processors, slide presentations, or other digital applications like Microsoft Excel. Perhaps there was a hypothesis that one or two generations like myself were taught these skills, and the next generation would naturally adapt to it. However, my sophomore year high school student has a hard time formatting the text, creating a copy of Google Docs, or taking and inserting screenshots. File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, and Help menus may also be stickers.
Last year, I had a black student who rarely came to class but decided to graduate to play sports at university. He completed the missing task by manually copying Google search results for assignment questions and issues, leading to mystical answers that are often far from the point of lesson. In my classroom, I often see emerging multilingual students using my phone or Chromebook to take pictures of the text and receive automatic translations of the text on my device.
These strategies may help you complete a particular task, but in this context, technology is used as a substitute for learning instead of conduits. In other words, while heirs of Silicon Valley Tech elite have gained fluency by using computers and AI models as thinking partners and digital assistants, without adequate direct instruction or modeling in schools, the students I teach are developing a dependency on technology to make their ideas.
The future of work
Already, I feel like I missed the mark when teaching students how to navigate existing technology that prepares marginalized and underdog students for success, stability and lifelong earning opportunities in the current digital workforce. With the sudden spread of AI models and the resulting changes in industries and new ventures, I still struggle with the amount that I should continue to emphasize the development of these skills I learned while in school. I think our teachers need to invest their time and effort into these, or maybe it’s better to skip ahead and maintain the way wealthy schools start training their students to skilled users of emerging technology.
The comprehensive goals of public education in the United States are not well defined; Federal Department of Education’s mission statement “By promoting education excellence and ensuring equal access, it means promoting student achievement and preparing for global competitiveness.”
In a school like me, ensuring global competitiveness preparation and equal access means school or district level strategies to incorporate modern digital tools. Instead, the most chronically purely struggling students are expected to navigate Google Classroom and the Internet search engine to support learning in class, but often unequipped.
It is essential to bridge the current gap between technology and digital literacy in the families that wealthy and educated families and my students come to. Even if my mostly black, Latino and immigrant students were chosen to attend the same elite university as the young people in their neighborhoods, they walked to campus at a disadvantage. Schools, districts and community organizations serving the least marginalized and underresourced students must work together to prioritize advanced and responsible approaches to incorporating new digital literacy and skills into the structure of education curriculum and public school learning.
Just as schools, universities, entrepreneurs, governments and employers in all fields support the changing horizon of unknown scales with AI, students and their families should be required to provide opportunities to develop skills that effectively use these new, powerful digital tools.
