Students and Computer Skills

Last month I was having problems opening "pdf" files on my computer. A helpful student saw my frustration, and asked if they could be of assistance. Two minutes later, problem solved.

I can appreciate the vast knowledge that students seem to innately have when it comes to computers. It is for this reason that I am so surprised to find a lack of skills with relatively basic software such as MS Office. Even my Grade 12 students struggled to use relatively basic features in MS Excel, Word, or PowerPoint. For example, many students are not sure how to manipulate the layout of a word document that includes tables and images, or how to change from "Portrait" to "Landscape". So, why are our students reaching Grade 12 without ever having learned these seemingly basic computer skills? Perhaps, somewhere along the path to classroom technology integration, our students were left behind to figure all this out on their own. It is logical to conclude that a young generation who has used a computer since the age of two will gain these skills naturally over time. I have often thought that students "just know" how to use these programs, however I have learned that this is not an assumption that can or should be made.

Having said that, I can certainly understand if they are unsure how to use a program that they rarely use, such as Excel, but I am amazed at their methods of troubleshooting. When in difficulty, most students prefer to type their problem into YouTube or Google, which of course yields many results. The problem is that the helpful tips they find are for different versions of the program, which makes the advice confusing and hard to follow. I rarely see my students click on the "Help" menu within the program itself before asking me for help.

What I have learned over the past few years is to not assume that students have these skills just because they are a "plugged in" generation. Although they may possess an impressive skill set when it comes to computers, it is still necessary to explicitly teach students how to use common software more effectively, as well as a variety of troubleshooting strategies and the perseverance to learn new programs.

Thanks for reading,

Marcia