Digital Literacy: A Moving Target

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When I was in the ninth grade, I took a typing class. It was expected that most students in my school did. We did have electric typewriters back then, not manual, but they were definitely typewriters and not keyboards. My classmates and I learned about the home keys, and over the course of a year we learned the others and different conventions of typing. Typing was an expected skill for most students, so could be considered a basic literacy.

The author with his pal Max honing their digital literacy skills on their weekly Zoom family meeting.

Twenty years later, I was working on digital literacy training for school leaders. No more typewriters! It was all PCs now. I had just entered an elementary school in Georgia to visit with and interview an exemplary principal when we ran across a young man pushing a large cart of older laptops down one of the school hallways. The principal looked at me and said, “I’m having the old laptops sent to the Kindergarten classes so they can learn keyboarding now and really apply those skills next year.” Next year, as in the first grade! So much for the keyboarding expectations for high school students.

Travel forward another 20 years to a fourth-grade classroom I visited in Kentucky last week. Every child had a laptop on their desk and they were working away on several tasks comparing and contrasting Greek and Roman gods to prepare for reading one of the Percy Jackson novels. The students were going back and forth between a spreadsheet, some notes from online research, and the Canva website where they were using their information to create an infographic. One young man in front of me furiously pounded away on his keyboard about as quickly as I can touch type, but…he was truly a hunt-and-peck aficionado. Most of the students were. My typing teacher wouldn’t have liked their style. She might have gotten out the masking tape to cover their keys, but their method didn’t slow them down. I can’t imagine what they could do with their thumbs on a handheld, touchscreen device. I’m sure they’re much better than I am.

This little storyline emphasizes that the idea of what a person should know and be able to do to be considered “literate” evolves over time. I’ve been working with schools on aspects of digital literacy for much of my career, but just like this story, the digital literacy projects I worked on 20 years ago are different from what they are now. I’m co-author of a textbook with two of my mentors, Kathy Cennamo from Virginia Tech and Peg Ertmer from Purdue. It focuses on the ISTE Standards for Students and for Educators, but those standards have changed over time. They’ve moved from being very tool-focused to focusing on what teachers and students do with digital resources. To reflect this, we had some foundational agreements about technology that thread their way through the multiple editions. One of those is that technology is constantly changing, which means “being literate” changes, and so we encouraged our readers to become lifelong learners who understand how to manage change and develop new literacies as they become important. Another is, “it’s more important how you use technology than if you use it.” (Cennamo, K. S., Ross, J. D., & Ertmer, P. A. (2019). Technology integration for meaningful use. A standards-based approach. Boston, MA: Cengage. P. 2.)

I’ve been working on the “what technology skills do our students need to know” question with numerous school districts across the country a lot lately. During the time of forced remote learning, so many school districts bought a lot of devices and digital resources for students but didn’t have the time or ability to thoroughly teach everyone how to use them—even teachers. Now that students are once again attending schools every day with those devices, we are seeing teachers and students with access to powerful devices and digital resources but perhaps not using them as effectively as they could be. But what to focus on? Many adults are calling for isolating technology and teaching those skills separately. For example, some think we should stop everything and focus on typing, because typing was once seen as an important skill (and still probably is for some) but is it that important for everyone? Phones are more ubiquitous than laptops with keyboards. What skills do you need to be considered literate if your digital device doesn’t have a keyboard or you don’t need to use one? Phones have teeny tiny keyboards that I can’t use my touch-typing skills with, and many people just talk to their phone (or TV remote, or smart speaker, or other device) to navigate the apps on it.

I go back to the how you’re using technology part of the equation as being the most important consideration for being literate. The ISTE Standards no longer focus on the technology you’re using. Instead, they encourage students and adults to become empowered learners who leverage technology to connect with content and with others to support their learning. They acknowledge how important it is for all of us to be savvy digital citizens that understand what it means to live in an information-rich society and to manage and protect our own information and data that is now generated in any number of media formats with the click of a button. They inspire us to communicate and collaborate locally and across the globe and to create innovative new products and propose solutions to challenging, real-world problems. What I see as the connecting thread behind those standards is that they happen everywhere, not in isolation. They happen in every class. They happen on the playground, and at home, and everywhere else, and so maybe the secret to digital literacy is to not consider it something separate or unique. It’s just literacy. And we use the tools that are necessary to be literate in whatever situation we’re in.

This entry is cross-posted with the Region 8 Comprehensive Center blog.

When I was a “lower level” student.

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How teacher language impacts student achievement.

I have recently come to the realization that, yes indeed, there are some words that actually “trigger” me. I don’t need a time out when I hear them and can recover on my own, but now being back with educators in person certain words definitely stand out as triggers for me. Before I get to those, a story.

Prior to matriculating to junior high, my sixth-grade teacher decided that I was a “lower level” student in English and shouldn’t be able to be in the “advanced” English class. Years earlier, thanks to my parents filling our house with books, I entered kindergarten reading at a third-grade level. For years my English teachers sent me to different classes at reading time because I had already read all of the books in kindergarten, or first, or third grade, and so. In the fifth grade, I tested into and was able to attend my district’s gifted-and-talented program. So, in sixth grade, it wasn’t that I wasn’t capable. Instead, I was pretty social in class (okay, very social) and an excellent procrastinator. I believe I could claim I was an “advanced” student of procrastination. Therefore, my sixth-grade teacher labeled me “lower level” and sent me on.

The “lower level” English class—technically the “intermediate” class—was a dramatic and, I would argue, a damaging experience. It would have had tremendous, long-term negative impact on my school career and beyond if it had not gone through a course correction two years later. It didn’t show up as a problem on my report card, as I easily earned the highest grades possible in that class. However, my seventh-grade English teacher, thanks to my being labeled “lower level,” subsequently had much lower expectations for me and all the other “intermediate” kids.

It’s not like I didn’t know what the students in the “advanced” class were doing. They were all my friends! We had been hanging out together for years, and I spent most of my day with them outside of English. They would tell me what they were learning in that class and I would think, “Wow, we’re not doing any of that!” They had the very same teacher I did, just one period earlier.

I remember distinctly when they told me about the phone lessons at lunch one day. One of the skills my “advanced” friends were taught was how to answer the phone—using a classroom set of rotary phones. Maybe they were expected to be…what? Receptionists? Legal assistants? Do CEOs have to answer their own phones? Maybe. I don’t understand why answering the phone was in their curriculum, but I was jealous.

Imagine my joy one day when I walked into my English class, literally as my friends were leaving, and the phones were on the desks! I actually told my English teacher, “Finally! We get to use the phones, too!” Her reply was that they had run over in the previous period, so she asked me to pick them all up and put them away. No phones. No fun learning. Back to being “lower level.”

I was automatically assigned the “intermediate” English class again in the eighth grade, my guess is with no consideration from my current English teacher and no influence by having top grades throughout the year. Luckily, in the eighth grade, I was assigned a more free thinking teacher. She pulled me aside at one point after class and asked me, “Why are you in this class? You definitely shouldn’t be in this class.” I told her the story of my sixth-grade teacher. She tried, but she wasn’t able to change my assignment that year. She did, however, work extra with me and assign me additional work to prepare me to re-enter the “advanced” track in the ninth grade. I am tremendously indebted to this teacher. Her willingness and courage to buck the system probably saved not only my academic career but led to the things I’ve accomplished in my professional career.

It took me several years to get caught up. My friends had actually learned a LOT of different skills in their “advanced” classes that I had never been exposed to. Many of the most notable were related to grammar. It wasn’t until my ninth-grade English teacher pulled me aside, heard the story, and helped me try to catch up to my friends. That work continued throughout high school. Again, it wasn’t that I wasn’t capable, it’s that the well-accepted cultural norm of one person deciding I wasn’t “advanced” pigeon-holed me in a place where I wasn’t expected to know some things or develop some skills—skills like using conjunctions and the proper use of the semi-colon.

There’s a coda. Because of a scheduling conflict, in the 10th grade I was put in a “basic” English class. Oh my word! If you thought the expectations for the “intermediate” kids was low, “basic” was like a different planet! I attended one class, immediately went to the principal’s office, and told them I wasn’t leaving until they put me back into an “advanced” English class. They could call my parents. They could assign me detention. I didn’t care. I wasn’t leaving until I knew I never had to go back to that class again. Luckily, one English teacher agreed to add one more student to her already full “advanced” English class. She became one of the mentors in my life.

With those experiences in my own education and having the realization that if I had stayed in the “lower level” classes, even the “intermediate” class, my life could have been much different. I might have gotten into college, but not with the scholarships that I received. I wonder if I would’ve believed I could earn a Ph.D.? Maybe I wouldn’t have written the chapters, books, and research studies I’ve published. I certainly wouldn’t be asked to teach teachers! How could someone “lower level” have any credibility with teachers?

That’s why, when I am working with teachers, and one of them says to me, “This real-world technology stuff is fine for my advanced kids, but my lower-level students…” I am triggered!

I’ve heard statements like this so many times in districts across the country. We need to remember that the language we use has consequences. When educators use terms like “advanced” or “lower level” we immediately set up barriers for some students. When we describe a student as “lower level,” we are limiting our expectations for that student. And our students know it! They lower their expectations, as well. They know we don’t believe in them. I knew my teachers had lower expectations for me and so they didn’t even expose me to basic foundational knowledge and skills—like grammar!

We are all “advanced” at some things, and there are some things that all of us have to work harder at. If we want our students to do better, perhaps like getting higher grades or doing well on things like high-stakes assessments, let’s stop limiting them. To do this, all we need to do is stop saying a few words, like “advanced” and “lower level.” Removing these words from our vocabulary can remove limits to our expectations as well as barriers to every student’s potential.

Developing Student Help Desk Programs

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I’ve been working with several states and districts to help them develop student help desk programs. No, I still can’t fix your computer; although, I can probably do more than before. I’m working with them from the curriculum and instruction perspective in order to help high school students become prepared to take industry-level certifications. The following is cross-posted with Advanced Learning Partnerships, a consulting group from North Carolina that I work with.

“The solution to your workforce problem is in your classrooms!” Or so says Caroline Sullivan. And why should you believe Caroline? As the Executive Director for the North Carolina Business Committee for Education (NCBCE) in the Office of the Governor for that state, workforce issues are at the forefront of her mind, and her daily work. Plus she knows about schools. She’s led numerous successful initiatives within her state that connect what teachers and students are doing in classrooms to address the needs in business and industry. One of the most recent of these, providing support for schools and districts to develop their own Student Help Desks, addresses an area of high need in schools and beyond.

A Growing Need for Help Desk Support

In 2020, as schools grappled with addressing the needs of students through remote learning, many strove to provide as many students as possible with their own computing device. This immediate need for devices was matched with funding—lots of funding! Thousands upon thousands of devices began showing up in districts and found their way into students’ hands to keep the learning going. The catch? Much of the funding could be used to purchase equipment, but unfortunately, not to hire personnel. School districts that were seeing a few thousand to 50,000 or more new devices now had to find a way to support them and keep them running, because technology is great…when? When it works!

Most school districts are already strapped for sufficient tech support. Schools have long been a setting where each tech staff member routinely supports 1,000 to 3,000 devices or more, as compared to a range of 50 to 100 in many corporate settings. As districts across the nation brought in from a few hundred to tens of thousands of new devices in the span of a few weeks or months, the need for additional tech staff multiplied exponentially. Even by the conservative estimate of 1,000 devices per support position, district tech staffing positions should have expanded anywhere from a handful to dozens of employees. The reality was that few new staff were hired.

Seeing the rapidly growing need for tech support and realizing funds were coming into the state, Caroline Sullivan led NCBCE’s efforts for a more homespun strategy that built capacity within local schools and districts—Student Help Desk programs. Working with Advanced Learning Partnerships and supported by a network of industry leaders, consultants at ALP developed models and created resources that could be used by teachers throughout North Carolina, teachers like Tiffany Taylor from Halifax County.

Halifax County recruited Tiffany for the new adventure of creating a Student Help Desk and preparing students with both the technical as well as inter- and intrapersonal skills required to provide customer service on the devices they and their fellow students now had in hand. They also were being prepared to service the devices teachers, administrators, and other staff relied on every day. Up for the challenge, Tiffany just needed a little help.

Finding Support

That help came in the form of coaching and curriculum design support from Advanced Learning Partnerships. Halifax County chose a class-based model to prepare their students to run the Help Desk. As a consultant with ALP, I worked with Tiffany to develop a simulated workplace environment in her new classroom that incorporated a problem-based approach to help students develop new skills. The curriculum was sequenced to prepare students to not only operate the Help Desk but to earn valuable industry-standard certifications, as well. Students who completed the first course would be prepared to take the certification exam for CompTIA’s IT Fundamentals+ while completing the full three-course sequence would prepare them for CompTIA’s A+ certification, widely recognized as the gateway to many IT careers.

Students developed teamwork and communication skills by creating work teams with their own norms and roles. They better understood standard Help Desk processes aligned to a service delivery model by using and updating their own Help Desk knowledge base. They developed technology skills not only with their teacher, Tiffany, but also with collaboration from IT support staff who were able to share common problems of practice from their own help desk experiences. Halifax outsourced some of its tech support to YCM Solutions, a local IT company. YCM staff created videos and, when possible, conducted hands-on labs with students focused on skills such as setting up and configuring a desktop computer, creating a wired or wireless network, and troubleshooting common issues.

Help Desk Options

ALP is replicating the Help Desk model and customizing it in additional school districts and states across the country. The need for IT support for schools can be found in districts large and small and ALP understands this need. The models piloted in North Carolina include the course-based setting as well as options for creating an afterschool club or incorporating Help Desk duties into a paid or unpaid internship. Schools can determine which of these three options best fit depending on their current course offerings as well as the skill levels of available student participants. 

Afterschool programs provide the fewest number of contact hours but can be a great way to build student interest and provide opportunities for students to develop some basic skills if they don’t have the opportunity to take a structured class. Internships rely on students with more deeply developed technical skills but then allow students to apply those in real settings while they learn about the procedures and tools used to support a Help Desk service delivery model. Many states have Career and Technical Education programs that provide guidance on student intern programs that can easily support a Student Help Desk.

Are you interested in a Student Help Desk?

One of the most enticing aspects of a student Help Desk is its flexibility. Yes, students can be provided the opportunity to earn course credit along with industry certifications, but different programs vary their focus areas to address a variety of certifications and courses, including cybersecurity, networking, and many popular hardware and software certifications. Some Help Desk programs can include aspects of training or professional development where students actually help teachers and other staff understand how to use resources provided by the district. 

Of course, schools and districts are also seeing the benefit of increasing the number of qualified personnel who can provide tech support. Sometimes these students move from interns to paid support staff, whether within their own school districts or in local area businesses that need them, like hospitals, libraries, or anywhere computers can be found.

Are you interested in establishing a Student Help Desk program in your state, district, or school? Reach out to the experienced consultants of Advanced Learning Partnerships to schedule a discovery session today. Those computers aren’t going to fix themselves! Reach out and let ALP get you started on a program that rewards both you and your students.