An issue on screenagers wouldn't be complete without the perspectives of the screenagers themselves. Fortunately, ASCD had such a group on staff last summer—our high school and college interns. So Educational Leadership asked them about how they liked to learn and about their experiences—both good and bad—with technology use in school. Here's what they told us.
PowerPoint
"My history teacher did a good job with PowerPoints. He would put them online, which made for really great reviews. But my science teacher did just the opposite. She would get up and read off her PowerPoints. And that's so boring for everyone."
"My history teacher's PowerPoints had a lot of the key points, and he would talk around it. He would hardly ever address what was on the slide. The PowerPoint was just to help us focus on what he was talking about."
Using technology is good. But you need to take it to the next level where you're not just reading what you wrote on the PowerPoint."
Multitasking
"My English professor got really angry about people texting and said, 'Don't you think it's rude while someone's talking?' But it's not. We've really become a generation where we have to do two things at once, and we can focus on each of them. It was a five-minute argument because he was losing."
"It's not like we're so distracted that we can't accomplish anything. It's more that we've gotten into the habit of doing a couple of things at the same time and being able to function adequately in both areas. I don't think that's a bad thing."
"I can write an essay and listen to music at the same time. It actually helps me because one thing is in the back of my mind taking up the space that the essay isn't. So I feel like I'm working more productively."
"I doodle. I'm a writer. I write notes in the margins about things in the back of my head. I just have to do more than one thing at once now. There used to be a time--when I was in 1st grade maybe--where I just focused on the teacher. But not now."
"If you can have a 4.0 and are still dialing Faceook friends and IM-ing and texting, that's more of an accomplishment than people back in the day who had a 4.0 but didn't have [all the distractions], like TV or video games."
"It's like playing with toys when you're younger. You may have blocks and something else. But you play with both equally. Just because we're thinking about an English paper on Keats doesn't mean we can't also think about football practice."
Interactive Whiteboards
"If teachers are explaining something using a whiteboard, instead of our just hearing it and trying to do it, we can see their screen and do what they're doing along with them. So the explanation is easier to understand."
"I would love for more teachers to use SMART boards. If a teacher can scroll through the SMART board, select something, and show you everything, they're the best! But the teacher has to know how to use it and not ask us, 'How do I close this?'"
"Make the SMART board workshop mandatory. Some teachers in my school were good with using a SMART board, some were great, and some just wrote on it—they literally hung a piece of paper on it. They'd rather use it that way than use it as a SMART board. That's my parents' tax money, right?"
"I've only had one teacher who had a SMART board, and she didn't know how to use it. She was just like, 'Well, all right, that didn't work. Just rely on your textbook for now. I'm going to try and figure this out. And then we'll get back to it.' But why have a SMART board if you're not going to use it?"
Technology-Challenged Teachers
"I'd much rather explain some technology thing to a teacher than sit there and watch them try to figure it out for themselves. Just admit you don't get it. We all know you don't know. Because if you knew, it would be up already. Just don't be afraid to ask for our help."
"There's a lot of pressure for teachers to use technology, but no one teaches them how. What drives me nuts is when we're going to watch a YouTube video, 10 minutes later the teacher still hasn't figured out how to start it. It's kind of cute. But it's a waste of time."
"One of the most frustrating things is when you have to help the teacher with technology. It's annoying. It puts you above them. And then it's hard to learn from them."
Teachers shouldn't be afraid of technology. Understand that it's how we live our lives. So don't just push it out. Learn to cope with us and how we work.
The Downside of Technology
"Technology has become such a social and fun way for us to do things that, in a way, it's more useful to power down in the classroom, especially with cell phones. Because otherwise, you'd be distracted."
"I hate reading on the computer. I like to have something in my hand."
"I had to dish out $120 for an online textbook— and then it goes away at the end of the semester. You can't hold onto it in case you want to reference something in the future."
"I wonder whether getting a cell phone really young may influence the way kids end up writing because they're texting before their writing is fully developed. At 14, your writing is at a place where it's good enough that you're not going to be spelling 'you' with a U instead of y-o-u. But if you're 5, it may change things."
"Sometimes you get so caught up in technology, you forget about everything else."
"During the class, it was all lecture. But it's good to learn to listen and take notes. You have to experience that, too."
Cyberbullying
"The thing about cyberbullying is that there's a record of it that can be found and printed out. And there you go. You're in trouble. Kids don't realize that. They hide behind computers and cell phones and say all these things they would never, ever say to your face."
"Cyberbullies break others down. There's no limit to it. They can type as long as they want, say whatever mean things they want to say."
"You have to teach kids how to deal with cyberbullying. Kids need to know that Facebook isn't the problem. Teachers need training so they know what they're dealing with—and not just say we need to keep kids off the Internet because they're going to cyberbully each other. Kids are always going to bully each other. They're going to find ways. Schools just have to prevent this or teach them not to do certain things. Isn't that their job?"
"Once a week, 7th and 8th graders would get together to talk [about online conduct]. The school brought in different people to teach us various things. One thing they told us was that you can't hide behind the computer forever, that there are track records, that it's becoming a big offense."
"You can block people on Facebook. You can block people from e-mailing you. But you can't block a text. You can block a number, but they can use a different phone or text you from a computer. You don't know who's actually talking to you through a computer. It's completely possible you're having a conversation with someone you don't even know."
"If you put jk [just kidding] after anything, you just kind of erase whatever you said. So someone can say, 'I hope you die. jk.' And then all of a sudden, it's like, OK, wait. Do you mean that?"
"There's a mean version of Facebook. You just go in there and talk about someone you don't like. There was a girl that people talked about there. It was bad because everybody knew. People from outside school could access it and write and read about her."
"Someone I know used to have a friend--but it was more like a frenemy. This girl was Googling her on Facebook. So my friend blocked her on Facebook. So the girl started sending her e-mails. So my friend blocked her on e-mails. Then she started texting her. So my friend blocked her on texting. Then it escalated when the girl came out to her house."
"The only advice my school gave about cyberbullying was to snitch. They said, 'If you're getting cyberbullied, then send us an anonymous e-mail.' Then how are you going to know it's me? There's something wrong with this 'anonymous.' You get back to me, and then everybody is going to know that Sam's getting bullied."
What's Already Working Well
"Before class, one of my high school teachers would text us a question that you had to answer in class. Sometimes you'd know the answer. Sometimes you wouldn't. So you'd talk to classmates to get their thoughts. There were big separations of groups in my school. These questions would break the separation. Because you don't usually talk to that one guy, but he may know the answer. By the time you show up to class, everybody has talked about everybody else's reading assignment. So it made us study as a group. It made us more of a community."
"One of my teachers used Skype. That's face-to-face interaction. If I had a problem with some math problem I was working on, I could take a picture of it and put it on the Skype screen. She could see where I was making my mistake. It really helped."
"My whole university, all the professors, just cut their office hours because students weren't using them. Students didn't want to truck all the way across campus to sit in a professor's office for a few minutes just to ask a question. So a lot of my professors said, 'Here's my AIM account. And here's how you can get a hold of me.' It's comforting to know that they're actually there during that time. They're not just saying, 'Your e-mail's waiting in my inbox.'"
"One professor made us write stuff on the discussion board. I had a lot of classes like that, where you wrote something there, and it didn't matter. But this teacher would print it out and say, 'Hey Joe, I noticed you had this great post. You want to elaborate on that in class?' At first, it was really scary. But then it was really cool. Because she reminded you of something smart you said."
In one of my college classes, I was seat 327. So if I hit my [responder] to reply to a question, the teacher would say, 'OK, seat 327. So--here he'd look up my name--what do you have to say on the subject?' So I wouldn't come into the classroom and just go to sleep. Both technology and the older methods can coexist. My English teacher put on a version of Hamlet. And we read it from the book while watching the movie. When you're reading a play, a lot goes on that you don't necessarily see. My teacher would pause every 10 minutes and say, 'So do you guys get what this means? Tell me about it.' As long as you're on top of it, kids won't be asleep.
What Educators Should Do
"The most important thing for teachers is to be comfortable with what they're using. It doesn't have to be super high tech. My math teacher used a projector, and it was one of my favorite classes. Then I would go to this other class where the teacher used PowerPoints and the SMART board, but I didn't get any more out of it because she wasn't comfortable with the technology."
"There are some bad things on the Internet for school purposes, like Facebook. But there are helpful things, too. If a school knows what's helpful, what's bad, and what's in the middle, then they can keep out all the bad stuff, monitor the stuff in the middle, and let us free-range on the stuff that's good."
"Teachers shouldn't be afraid of technology. Understand that it's how we live our lives. So don't just push it out. Learn to cope with us and how we work."
Assignments don't always need to be papers. Assignments don't always need to be text. There are other ways of figuring out what kids know using technology.
