“This is an invitation
across the nation,
the chance for folks to
meet
There'll be swinging, swaying, music playing,
There'll be swinging, swaying, music playing,
and dancing in the
street”
- Martha & The Vandellas
I live in an urban area of Phoenix, right
downtown in fact. One consequence to
growing up in a place like New York City is that you’re never comfortable
unless you see lots of cars, hear police sirens all night, or have your street
lit up by police helicopters on the weekends.
Because we live in the city, and while my kids were young, I decided to
teach my them to cross the street. I
knew I wasn’t going to be able to ban the cars.
The other option was to pretend the cars weren’t there and never ever
let my kids cross the street. I didn’t
think that was reasonable. Eventually
they had to deal with cars so it made sense to teach them early and often. When it comes to the web and our children,
that’s exactly what many of us are doing.
We are pretending the web is not there.
The web isn’t going anywhere so ignoring it isn’t
going to work. We certainly aren’t
teaching our kids how to navigate the web (teaching them to cross the
street). We’re left with the only option
we have left, we simple ban it. I don’t
know if that’s the smartest idea in the world.
Like cars, eventually they are going to have to deal with the web. Wouldn’t it make sense to teach them, early
and often?
I have the opportunity to speak to lots of
principals, superintendents, school board members, and parents. Whenever I bring up this subject, they all
start blaming each other. The
superintendent says, “the school board will never let me.” The school board member says, “the parents
wouldn’t let us.” The parents say, “the
school is to rigid and would never allow it.”
One of my favorite arguments I hear all the time is that the kids are
picking up the skills at home. The general
argument goes something like this:
“Listen, the parents here are very
traditional. They don’t want their
students surfing the web. What if they end
up complaining to the board? Also, the
feds would take away our eRate funding if we unblocked YouTube and we can’t
lose that (I even had one senior administrator of a large district tell me that
they would lose ALL federal funding, including Title 9!) Besides, the kids are
developing these digital skills on their own, in their own home. They were born digital citizens so there is
no need to teach them. Yes, I know a lot
of them already have access to the web in their pockets but they aren’t doing
it on school property so we aren’t accountable.”
I push back:
“Have you talked to the parents? Have you showed them the benefits of the web? Are you demonstrating how your school is developing
student skills as you prepare them for their future? Have you showed them how the web opens up new
opportunities to learn? Have you offered
them ‘parent Internet classes’ to teach them what their kids will learn? In terms of CIPA and eRate, can you give me
the name of just one school that lost their funding for violating CIPA? How much did they lose? Can you show me where it says YouTube violates
CIPA? Finally, in terms of students developing
the skills on their own at home, are you sure that’s what’s happening? How do you know?”
The assumption that kids are learning these
skills at home is insane. Most college
educated folks lack basic search skills.
Even if it was true, not all our kids would be learning these critical
skills. If the kid comes form a family
that makes more than $75,000 a year, they have a 90% chance of having computer
and Internet access at home. If they
comes from a family that makes less than $30,000 a year, then they have less
than a 50% chance to have this access at home.
This applies to new technologies as well. For high income families, 55% of kids have
used a smart phone or a tablet. For low
income families, that number drops to 22%.
In fact, 38% of low income
parents say they don’t even know what an app is. In case you were wondering, it’s only 3% for high
income parents.
So even if they were learning how to be good
digital citizens at home, and we all know that most of them are not, then we
are failing a good portion of our students, the ones who probably need the
skills the most. We need a different
approach. We need to teach our kids how
to cross the digital street and turn their web experience into something
positive. We need to get parents
involved. We need to look at the web as
the new platform which will require a set of skills critical to success. We
should also be asking ourselves, what do we need to teach our kids so they are
safe online? How do we teach them to
stay secure? How do we teach them to
protect themselves and their information?
How do we teach them about privacy, and what is the right and wrong way
to interact with each other?
Things are certainly getting better, like in the
case of Chicago Public Schools lifting it’s ban on YouTube (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-02-01/news/ct-met-cps-digital-20120201_1_cps-jean-claude-brizard-ban) to help expand digital
learning.
Filtering bad content and sites is essential but not
in the way many school systems do it.
Broad filters that catch everything, including sites like National
Geographic, aren’t very useful.
We need to teach our kids to be good digital
citizens. Even more importantly, we need
to teach our kids to be great digital
leaders! The world’s information is at
our fingertips, we must take advantage of it.
As my teacher friend says, what students post and share on-line should
be the reason why they get into college, not the reason they don’t.
Let’s teach our kids how to cross the street.
