I’m old enough to be the parent of some of my students (the first-years, anyway). If you want some idea of what that means in the history of computing, my first introduction to a computer came in the sixth grade; we had a Commodore PET in our classroom. At home, my brother and I begged for the Sears knockoff of the Atari system one Christmas. The first computer we had in our home was the Commodore 64.
When I started trying to integrate technology into my courses, I made two assumptions:
- I have no formal training in the use of computer technology. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned because it was something I needed or wanted to know, and I was willing to experiment as needed to figure it out. Due to my lack of training, I really don’t know much.
- My students have had much more exposure to computers than I had growing up.
Based on these two assumptions, I made a third:
- Students have good technical skills, and are comfortable enough with computers to readily adapt to anything I might do technologically in the classroom, or ask them to do outside of class.
This is an incorrect assumption. At least, it’s an assumption that isn’t accurate for all students.
What my experience has taught me is that, while students have had significant exposure to computers (and to other tools such as cell phones and iPods), their use of technology has been fairly limited. Students are generally quite good at wordprocessing, using email, texting, communicating via IM, and making use of MySpace or Facebook.
Beyond that, however, their skills are limited. Google Documents is something new (though their familiarity with wordprocessing helps them adapt to it quickly), blogs are unfamiliar, and Zotero is beyond anything most of them have encountered before (though most of them are quite impressed with its ability to create bibliographies).
Where I’ve erred as a teacher is in thinking that it’s sufficient to walk students through the use of these tools during a classroom session. (Actually, the first time I tried to use some of these tools, I didn’t even think to do that–I just pointed them toward the relevant website and asked them to start working with it. Big mistake.)
The problem was that I not only mistakenly assumed that students were already reasonably tech-savvy; I also made the mistake of thinking that poking around a site’s instruction pages and/or support forums (if they ran into trouble) would be a natural thing for them to do. It isn’t.
So, I’ve made some progress in trying to get students to use appropriate technology for class: I’ve gone from just telling them about good tools and pointing them to appropriate websites to taking class time to walk them through the use of these tools and getting them set up with accounts (though using class time this way tends to frustrate students who are tech-savvy or who simply aren’t interested).
My next step is to take a page out of George’s playbook: using ScreenSteps or a similar tool to create tutorials for my students (like this one on using Jiffle). My hope is that having the online tutorial to refer back to will help students to retain and master the skills we introduce in class.
What experiences have you had trying to integrate technology into your courses? Or, if you’re a student, what’s been your experience of your instructors’ use of technology? Let’s hear from you in the comments!
The image in this post comes from Flickr user Unhindered by Talent and carries a Creative Commons license.
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