For the last few years I’ve noticed a change in the skills that kids are walking in to my classroom with. A few years ago, many kids had strong, solid research and creative skills. The kinds of things that Mozilla would call web literacy. I was never a believer in Marc Prensky’s digital natives metaphor, it simply assumed too many things about kids. Some of them had strong skills and others struggled; it was impossible to lump them all under one title.

But that is changing. Over the last few years I’ve begun to notice a difference in the students who come in to my classroom. What I would consider to be basic computer use skills are weaker than they were in the past. I teach grade seven and eight. These kids are mostly 12 – 14 years old. These are the kids who are growing up with tablets and phones instead of laptops and desktops. And it is beginning to show.

Some students have trouble with basic commands such as CTRL – X to cut something and CTRL – V to paste. They aren’t really sure how to use Google to find something. Learning to use WordPress software, which often requires multiple tabs to be open and for a person to work between two sites to do things like locate images to use in  a blog post or create a link can be tough. Working between applications to do something like create an audio file with incoming sound effects and exporting out the web is very difficult.

I don’t believe this is just me, my school or my community. I’ve talked to a number of other people who are finding these same trends. Using their phones and tablets as their main computing device is catching up with our students. Some would argue that their skills aren’t poor, they are just different. I’m going to disagree because the skills that kids are gaining are mainly consumption skills and what they are losing is information verification, location and creative skills needed to share their point of view with the world.

This throws me back to having to teach some of the basics from ten years ago that for years, many students just knew how to do. They could create accounts at places and verify them. They could send email with attachments. Phones and especially tablets are taking their toll. I’d be curious to know about school districts that have spent large sums of money on tablet programs. I’m not sure any of them have been in existence for long enough yet, but I would bet these places are going to find some of these skills simply aren’t transferable between different devices.

This is another argument to go back to the open web instead of nosing around the closed in space of an app.

I’ve been doing some thinking in my classroom lately about what writing online looks like. I believe that writing online is distinctly different form writing offline on paper. While the two can be similar, online writing can and should be different; containing multimedia elements and a different organizational structure.

What else is different online is the depth of research and passion, even about the most obscure subjects, that can be pursued when writing online. The long tail being what it is, even the most obscure subjects can be meticulously researched and find an audience online.

Three examples.

I ran into this piece a few months ago. It is a single post written by a person who did a full tear down of an iPad charger along side of a counterfeit item. The author not only writes a long, detailed post that has 20 footnotes, but does a complete teardown and labeling of the charger’s components

but he also does an analysis of the power frequency spectrum output of each charger:

The author also has written a detailed post about the possibilities of mining bitcoins using a pencil and paper doing all of the math by hand….

Next up is a great recent post on line length and font when it comes to online reading comprehension. Once again, the author goes into great depth to outline the effect of line length on comprehension.

Long, in depth and detailed, this post is actually an interesting read when it comes to considering how these factors might affect the students in our classroom.

Finally, a computer programmer who is now a computational biologist has a blog where he looks at everything from the most popular post on reddit (month by month) to the efficiencies of different Clash of Clans troop types.

Many “experts” are saying that blogging is back (although I’m not sure where it ever went in the first place…). But the fact is that blogging and online writing are not the same as writing offline. These three spaces serve as ideas of the depth of research and micro topics that can find an audience online when people pursue their passions.

Over a decade ago, around the time when I was finishing my master’s degree, there was a lot of research with concerns about student’s reading comprehension of online texts.

There is no doubt that online spaces are complex and difficult for students to navigate and comprehend what they find there. Along with all of the textual cues of offline books (sub titles, charts and graphs, pictures with captions, etc), when they are online, students also need to deal with navigation and design issues along with spaces that may host information in a variety of forms such as video and audio that they don’t find in books.

Now, it seems, part of that issue revolves around income inequality.

An article in the New York Times outlines the problem:

“Although youngsters are experts at texting, posting photographs on Instagram and upgrading to the newest social media app while their parents are trying to decipher Facebook, children are still not adept at using the Web to find reliable information.”

The study was based on research completed with seventh grade students who were asked to conduct some basic web research and communicate thier findings via email.

“Because an increasing number of life tasks and jobs depend on the ability to sift through boundless online information presented in various formats — text, videos, graphics and social media — the ability of a student to accurately search for and evaluate information on the web is becoming crucial to success.

Yet few teachers are incorporating digital literacy into their curriculum. Because so many people use the Internet during leisure time, they might not realize how useful it could be as an educational tool, some experts say. They also may not realize how much their students need assistance.”

I’ve often found this with students in my own class. They believe they know how to use a computer and use the web because they can text, use apps such as SnpaChat and download music. And I’ve also started to find that as students move more to platforms such as phones and tablets which focus on apps, the skills they need to be academically successful have become less prominent.

We seem to be going backwards instead of forwards in this case.

Digital literacy takes many different forms from comprehension strategies to information location to production to coding. Balance is key.

Today is the last day of the 2013 – 2014 school year for me. Honestly, last year was one of the toughest years of my career and this year was one of the best.

I started teaching in September of 1993 at the Abu Dhabi International School. I was 23, I had graduated from university in May, was married at the beginning of July and moved overseas in August. It was a big year. Outside of a few trips as teenagers to the US with our own families, neither my wife or I had ever really traveled outside of Canada before, but we had new education degrees and no jobs so when an offer came in, we jumped.

It was exciting, scary and fascinating all at once.

After moving back to Canada, my wife and I both managed to get jobs in our home town of Snow Lake, MB and we’ve been here ever since.

I only realized this morning, on the last day of school, that this was the end of my twentieth year of teaching. Over that time I’ve taught grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11. I’ve mostly worked as an elementary or middle years classroom teacher but I’ve also served as a curriculum consultant and as a subject specialist high school teacher.

I was thinking back on that first last day of school. About how excited I was to have survived the year. I was thinking about the changes I’ve seen and the challenges that education, teachers and classrooms are facing. So here is my “after twenty years” list:

– After 20 years I still love teaching and kids. While we all have good days and bad days, there have been very few days when I rolled out of bed and thought I should be doing something else.

– After 20 years I’ve learned that education is constantly in a state of crisis. When I first started it was whole language teaching that was “ruining” education for kids. It moved from there into problems with employability and now we are into challenges around technology and innovation. While I am a huge believer that education needs to be continually changing to stay relevant, I think we are going to survive.

– We are all human. I’ve seen a lot of bad things in 20 years as a teacher. Situations at schools, with homes and families which should never take place. Most teachers can probably say this. I’ve met teachers who change kids’ lives and teachers who simply collect a pay cheque. Education is most of all a system built by humans with all of our mistakes and imperfections. We all need to be patient with kids, teachers and our systems.

– Kids and families are changing for the better and for the worse. I’ve seen amazing kids pass through the doors of our buildings. Talented, passionate people who excel in many different areas. I’ve also been yelled at by parents who felt that I had harmed their child in some way. Parenting and teaching are tough tasks in our society right now and we all need all of the support that we can from each other to help kids to grow into successful people.

– It is an exciting time to be alive. Technology, knowledge, connections and possibilities no matter who you are or where you live seem to be everywhere. I work as a classroom teacher in a small town in the middle of nowhere, but I’ve also spoken at international conferences, managed communities of learners, been connected with universities and research centres and learned entirely new fields of high tech knowledge. I’m currently living in Snow Lake and partnering with a teacher in Virginia to develop learning resources for a company in California. (I love the internet!) Learning in many ways is the centre of my life and I love to help kids to see that they are in no way limited by their geography.

– The physical stuff of education: books, buildings, supplies and technology is getting to be a larger and larger challenge. Who pays for it all? How do we pay for it? What is worth paying for? Is this model sustainable? A strong, well financed public education system is a great achievement of technologically advanced, democratic modern societies. The cost of ignorance is much higher than teaching salaries and supplies. We need to find a way to make this all work.

So there’s my 20 year list. Anyone else want to add to it? What’s on your list?