Several of the problem areas mentioned in a discussion of the breakaway literacies of the digital palette are complaints that have plagued me continually as I've grown into an educator. I see the variations in skills my students have in the digital realm daily. I know that they know how to navigate social media, online or integrated gaming systems, smart phones, and ereaders, but they struggle with the most basic of web 2.0 tasks.
As an education system, we are wholly failing our students by barricading technology at the door. When we set up firewalls and blocking technologies to prevent them from accessing certain materials without teaching them why we do it, without teaching them how to safeguard themselves at home or in public, when we tell them no phones allowed in schools and ban social networking broadly, we are failing them. I have sixth graders in my tutor group that can't type in a web address and go directly to it. They have to hunt and peck type some part of the address into a bing bar and hope the search result they click is the right one. They can't navigate site menus or search for quality information. The extent of the skills they display on a computer are to use them for overly simple web games and to make powerpoints with information they copied and pasted directly from a website without citing anything.
Our students desperately need to be taught how to function in a digital world. We are doing them more harm than good by banning and limiting the ways they can interact with technology. I have hope that the problems will begin to resolve as more and more young, millennial, web-era teachers graduate and enter the field. The improvement is happening, but it is still happening too slowly.
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