Who are these kids?
The students sitting in front of me in my classroom everyday sometimes make me feel like I am teaching in a foreign country. Honestly, even my teaching team (three first year teachers) can make me feel the same way. (If you feel similarly, a helpful list of all of Gen Z slang can be found here.) I am sure our parents felt the same about us, but with so much technology at their fingertips, I feel like our students are picking up on new trends and terms at a much more frequent rate. As you can see on the image below, our students use tech on average 10 hours a day. You can also see how different the engagement strategies are in comparison with the Baby Boomer generation. Both of these pieces of information show how important it is to use our tech resources effectively in order to engage our students.
What does the research say?
According to The Common Sense Census, the tech dependency and use has become even greater since the start of the Pandemic. Their study showed that tweens and teens' use of technology for entertainment has increased by 17% in the last two and a half years. This was not surprising to me. I feel like my own screen time has gone up, and as parents continue to balance working from home and the other demands of life, it is easy to use technology as a resource of entertainment.
With our students online so much, I am concerned about their safety and access to so much information. Every year before we hand out devices to our students we do five lessons on digital citizenship. I think these lessons are great, but they do not feel like enough, especially now that I teach sixth graders who have a hard time getting through the school day without checking their phones. According to The Family Online Safety Institute, teens seem to agree with this, but at the same time don’t know how to get the help they need in order to be safe online.
What surprised me was that teens, along with their parents, agreed that it was up to the parents to help teach online safety. I think the hardest part is where do parents get these resources. Now that we know they are wanting them and willing to share them with their teens, we need to get the resources into their hands so they can do that. I am not an expert on digital citizenship so I would love to hear of any great parent resources that are out there.
Is the research important?
Admittedly, I do not usually delve into the world of educational research. This is my sister’s world, working for a policy research firm, but seeing the numbers and information in black and white like that is quite startling. When you are given data showing teens are actually craving something, it is hard to ignore that.
Whether we realize it or not our whole day is dictated by educational research. The curriculum we use, the standards we assess with, and the standardized tests we administer are all data driven. After looking over this I do think it is important in teaching to look into the why behind what we are using by finding research that supports our teaching practices.
References
Born 1995 – 2009. Generation Z. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://generationz.com.au/
Bureau, U. S. C. (2021, October 28). 2020 decennial census visualizations and Infographics. Census.gov. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade/2020/2020-visualizations.html
Chen, T. (2019, June 1). A 43-year-old teacher has been keeping a running Google Doc of slang terms he overhears his students using. BuzzFeed News. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/43-year-old-teacher-has-google-doc-of-gen-z-slang-terms
Managing the narrative: Young people's use of online safety tools. FOSI. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.fosi.org/policy-research/managing-the-narrative
May 12, 2022 FOSI briefs - global-uploads.webflow.com. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://global-uploads.webflow.com/5f47b99bcd1b0e76b7a78b88/62d965f7a274fa1394bac4cd_Fosi%20Brief_Creating%20an%20Age%20Appropriate%20Design%20Code%20in%20California_May%202022%20V2.1.pdf
The Common Sense Census: Media use by tweens and teens, 2021. Common Sense Media. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-2021
To your point, our students are telling us what they want and need and we don't always listen! Project Tomorrow's Speak Up survey does an amazing job capturing this. Check out the infographic about what schools would look like if students were in charge: https://tomorrow.org/speakup/downloads/2021%20What%20would%20learning%20look%20like%20if%20STUDENTS%20were%20in%20charge.pdf
ReplyDeleteHey Rachael, I loved reading your post! Your aesthetic is amazing! To your point about parents teaching safety online and not knowing where to start, is a MAJOR issue. One that is persistently knocking on the door, but nobody seems to know how to answer it. I recently taught a digital citizenship lesson to my students and one of the big questions was, "If you were walking down the street and someone started talking to you, what would you do?" Most students said they'd be polite but wouldn't engage because it was a stranger. When the same question was asked while playing Minecraft, many students answered differently. It seems like there is a magic cloak over the digital world and there is no current form of policing system to hold people accountable for their actions. It is something I hope begins to get addressed in the coming years, as it's a growing issue we are seeing. Nice work!
ReplyDeleteHello Rachael,
ReplyDeleteYou and I both focused on the Common Sense Census. It was interesting to see what parts that you mentioned compared to my own. I too agree that I worry about my students' safety since they are everywhere and anywhere when it comes to online platforms. I also do many lessons during SEL to focus on digital citizenship. Last year, a big issue was online bullying. I think it's important for students to understand that although they are posting online, there is a way of all of it coming back to you. I think that is important for parents to teach their children online safety, but that makes me wonder about the parents who cannot. Some students either have parents who are older and do not really use much social media, or some even have parents who do not speak English. My own parents still have no idea what types of websites there are, so I could only imagine what it is like for ELLs today. I think as educators it's important to cover online safety since we use technology on a daily basis, and it's better to be safe. I rather encourage online safety as well so students understand that it matters since they are hearing it from me as well as their parents. I really liked your comment about finding research that supports our teaching practices since a lot of benefit could come from it. Great blog post!