Technology has permeated every aspect of our daily lives. It is in our homes, in our workplace, in our entertainment, and in our socialization. Most adults and even middle-aged and older people have managed to adapt to the rapid technological advancements taking place everywhere around us. Nowadays, seeing a 60-year-old person (sometimes even older) use high-tech devices to communicate with relatives or search for people with mutual interests is a common sight. So, what is wrong with teenagers?
What is paradoxical here is that younger people not only are born in an era when technology plays a major role in almost everything, but they are also raised able to handle technology with great efficiency. How many times have you seen one-year-old babies using the Youtube app with relative ease and speed, before they are able to walk or talk properly? Nevertheless, teenagers seem unable to perform what can be considered “easy” tasks such as sending or replying to an email, presenting a school project, or even searchimg for information on Google. Is it their fault? Can these inabilities be attributes to laziness?
That is a definite no! What adults tend to misunderstand is that teenagers are indeed technologically skilled, yet only on social media, which is a rather limited technological field. Therefore, teens are proud of creating their own Youtube videos, they spend hours deciding which photo or post they should upload, they have excellent gaming skills, and they can promote products from tne age of 12. However, when asked to contact their teacher via email or summarize information found online or present their work they tend to produce poor results which affect their learning and more importantly their motivation, and their morale.The only way to overcome these negative consequences is to teach our students, our children, the younger generations in our social circles to exploit the technological tools available with only one click at their fullest.
Some practical advice to achieve that is:
Before demanding the product, teach the process.
Instead of asking students to present their work, create a presentantion yourself giving presentation tips and assign the role of the evaluator to your students based on a checklist or specific criteria you have discussed together beforehand. Talk them through the process of sending and replying to emails in realistic tasks involving daily matters e.g. applying for a job position, enrolling in a class, reaching to a tutor for questions regarding homework. In addition, a Google search stops being a simple task when we consider the thinking processes involved in choosing suitable key words, filtering the results, and deciding which information is useful, and relevant. A way to hone teenagers’ searching skills is to have them look for something realistic and purposeful. A nice idea would be to create problem situations for which students have to find a solution online. The situations themselves are not important, they could range from searching for a recipe with specific ingredients to looking for a solution to a simple medical problem. What matters is the realistic and purposeful aspect of the task.
Shedding our misconceptions toward students’ supposed technological knowledge is only the first step. The next one requires us to become educators and despite the fact that teaching teens can be challenging and demand we channel our inner Yoda, it is a most rewarding process. Watching these youmg people, the future citizens of this world, being finally able to unleash their creativity, work their miracles, develop their thinking, and explore their ideas is indeed the definition of innovation.
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