The Myth about Student Competency

The idea that “our students are technologically competent” is one that is perhaps tossed around a little too much, according to Oblinger and Hawkins. While virtually 100% of students these days are competent using word-processing and surfing the internet, only 25% of students can create a web page and not too many are comfortable with spreadsheets or graphic design work. How should we measure information technology competency? The first question to answer, however, is what skills do students need in our digital world? After we determine this, we can consider how we might go about imparting and teaching these skills to our students. We must plan for widely-varying skill levels and also consider what extra technical support to provide, whether that means offering help desk services somewhere on a school campus, or whether that means teachers (or other classroom assistants) staying after school to answer questions and guide students through their challenges.

Personally, I am fond of the idea of empowering already-skilled students to help others with lower technical know-how. I figure that as long as those not-so-technically-savvy students have other places and times to impart whatever it is that they have to share, then I can be more certain that students will not feel overwhelmed or undervalued in the educational process. For me, I think my challenges will start with translation of computer technology into the languages which I wish to teach: Spanish, Japanese, and English as a second language. I can picture having my students complete research projects, forming presentations, constructing websites, or creating videos based on course language content, but I would like to immerse them as much as possible in the target language as I am teaching computer skills (as well as keep them on-task and in-language in their interactions with each other). I am not sure exactly how to go about doing this, as the majority of school programs and the majority of the internet use English, which makes it difficult for me in my efforts to teach Spanish and Japanese.

Oblinger, G., and Hawkins, L. (2006). The Myth about Student Competency. EDUCASE, 03/2006, 12-13.