We Need to Teach Computer Skills

I’ve heard this catch-cry for many years now. Since we’ve put computers into classrooms we’ve often considered it our most important task as teachers to show children how to use them. It’s been up to us to show the children how to save, how to print, how to use the “Word Art” in our word processing program, etc.

Or has it? Yes, I must admit that even in my own class I get frustrated when a child in Term 1 asks me if they can print work, only to have my affirmative response followed by another question: “How do I do that?” But we’ve known for a long time at St. Michael’s that the focus with our classroom computers is integration into classroom learning, not about how to use a computer. That comes with the classroom learning that has the technology well-integrated into it.

So we have our computer skills. But the Web 2.0 world we live in demands more. Rather, it doesn’t demand more, but it does demand a re-prioritisation. Many children now come to school familiar with their computers. What they don’t know will come with further use and their own desire to do more with the tools they have (given of course an encouraging environment to use them).

For the 21st Century learner, the most important computer skill is not about operating the hardware, but about managing the information that hardware opens up the gates to.

Take, for example, these statistics that I’m taking off the net as I type:

• Searching Google for st. michael’s primary school blacktown south brings up 43 200 results
• YouTube serves 100 million videos per day
• Last year Reuters released more than 2.5 million news items, which would have all been posted on its websites.

To manage this ever-growing world of information, our children need to be critical users of the Internet and have the information skills necessary to utilise the information they want and need effectively.

I suggest that teaching our children Information Skills and about Critical and Visual Literacies is more important than teaching them how to apply a template to a slide in PowerPoint, or finding where the eraser tool is in KidPix.

Hopefully Judy and I (and perhaps some others on our team) can share a bit more this year about how crucial it is for our students to be information literate as the first and foremost “technology skill”.