San Francisco is seen as a global tech capital, yet even here, high school students are shockingly ill-equipped to survive in the modern digital age. The school where I teach science is nestled in the historic Mission District of San Francisco, mere miles from the sprawling campuses of X, Meta and Google. During the pandemic, our district embodied this tech-forward identity by providing Chromebooks and hotspots for all students to go fully remote for an entire academic year of virtual learning.
When I began my classroom career in 2021, I expected my school would embody the same tech-forward identity I observed at the district level. To my surprise, I was shocked at my students' low levels of tech and Internet literacy. Over the past three years, I have seen my students’ gaps in knowledge regarding Internet use and other basic digital skills as a serious and overlooked problem. Not only does it hinder them from engaging with daily lessons and activities in high school, but it also exacerbates and re-cements existing disparities.
When I compare the experiences I have with students in my classroom to the stories I hear from colleagues and parents in neighboring districts with more wealth and affluence, it's clear to me that although this low-tech literacy issue is a generational problem, it is disproportionately affecting Black, Latino and immigrant students of color, further bifurcating the outcomes for these students and families beyond high school.
As a physics teacher, I am supposed to teach Newton’s Laws of motion and how electricity works. Unfortunately, my students' struggles while navigating essential Chromebook functions get in the way of the content. I struggle with how much class time I should dedicate to developing these crucial skills versus the science practices and ideas I am obligated and trained to teach.
To right the ship, families, schools and future employers must work together to prioritize a meaningful investment and evidence-based approach in developing a diverse and technically skilled workforce who can thrive in a rapidly changing economic landscape.
Google It
As a student, part of my schooling involved library classes, computer classes and English classes, during which I received dedicated instructional time using Mozilla Firefox and Google to do research for school projects. We were taught not to plagiarize and to cite our sources. I never fully memorized how to create a citation in MLA format, but I did learn how to use several websites that generated citations at the click of a button.
Through this and the guidance of my parents at home, I learned a skill that now seems innate to me. Effectively using the Internet as a tool for learning requires you to formulate a question or use keywords to click through and evaluate multiple search results until you find something that is both reliable and relevant to your question. Before these tools, as anyone who attended school before the age of the Internet would gladly attest, finding specific information took far more time and effort — and typically involved a trip to the library. With the omnipresence of Google, all our questions about the world became answerable in minutes.
When I gave one of my first assessments to a 10th grade physics class in 2022, one of the questions was a picture of a graph with a line that said, “Find the slope of this line.” The correct answer was two, and we reviewed this topic the day and weeks before. As I was grading this question, I found five different papers of students across different class periods who had an identical answer:
"This slope calculator solves for parameters involving slope and the equation of a line."
I was perplexed at the first answer, as it belonged to a student who had recently immigrated and identified as an English language learner. By the second answer, I realized with a sense of dread and amusement what had happened and confirmed my suspicions by googling the words: find the slope of this line. Rather than calculating the actual answer to the problem, my students copied the text instead.
As September turned to October and I spent more time in the classroom, I also noticed my students rarely used Google for their questions. When they were completing individual work or were asked to use a one-page article to find a definition of a physics vocabulary word, I heard a disjointed chorus of “Hey, Siri!” as I circulated throughout the room to help. I laughed the first time I heard it and engaged the students by asking why that was their approach. My amusement quickly dissipated as I recognized a clear pattern in their response. The voice-search approach was primarily taken by lower-income students of color who did not have their parents at home to help them during the day for their year and a half of virtual learning. The act of typing out a question and clicking through several results to find an appropriate answer had become too cumbersome for many of these 15-year-olds.
Troubleshooting
In my past internships and corporate jobs, the most valuable skill I learned to succeed in these roles was the ability to figure out how to navigate different digital tools and platforms with the help of troubleshooting, trial and error and the Internet. From Slack to MatLab to specific product and company software interfaces, clicking and trying things, and reading wiki-how articles, I developed proficiency in the tools I was expected to use to support my work in my daily role.
My current students, who grew up scrolling on a touch screen and engaging with app user interfaces, have no innate knowledge of how to navigate things like word processors, slide presentations or other digital applications like Microsoft Excel. There was perhaps an assumption that because one or two generations like my own were taught these skills, the next would naturally adapt to it. Yet, my high school sophomores struggle to format text, make a copy of a Google doc, or even take and insert a screenshot. The “File,” “Edit,” “View,” “Insert,” “Format,” and “Help” menus may as well be stickers.
Last year, I had a Black student who was rarely in class but determined to graduate to play sports in college. He would complete missing work by copying Google search results by hand for any question or problem on an assignment, leading to mystifying responses that were often far off base from the point of the lesson. In my classroom, I frequently see emerging multilingual students using their phones or Chromebooks to take pictures of text and receive an automatic translation of the text on their devices.
While these strategies may help them complete a particular assignment, in this context, they use technology as a surrogate for their learning instead of a conduit. In other words, while the heirs of the Silicon Valley tech elite are gaining fluency in using computers and AI models as thought partners and digital assistants, without sufficient direct instruction or modeling in school, the students I teach are developing a dependency on technology to do their thinking for them.
The Future of Work
It already feels like we have missed the mark in teaching students how to navigate existing technologies that would prepare marginalized and underresourced students for success, stability and lifetime earning opportunities in our current digital workforce. With the sudden proliferation of AI models and the resulting shifts in industry and new ventures, I am still struggling with how much I should continue to emphasize the development of these skills I learned when I was in school. I wonder whether we teachers should invest time and effort into these at all, or if it would be better to skip ahead and try to keep pace with how wealthier schools begin to train students to be skilled users of emerging technologies.
Although the overarching goal of public education in the United States is not well defined, the Federal Department of Education’s mission statement claims it is meant “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”
In schools like mine, preparation for global competitiveness and ensuring equal access would imply a school or district-level strategy to incorporate modern digital tools. Instead, the most chronically truant or otherwise struggling students are expected to navigate Google Classroom and Internet search engines to support their learning in the class, but are often not equipped.
Bridging the current gap in technology and digital literacy among wealthy and educated families and those of the families my students come from is essential. Even if my primarily Black, Latino and immigrant students were to be selected to attend the same elite colleges as young people from neighboring districts, they would walk onto campus at a disadvantage. Schools, districts and community organizations that serve the most marginalized and underresourced students should collaborate to prioritize a forward-thinking and responsible approach to incorporating new digital literacies and skills into the educational curriculum and structure of public school learning.
As schools, universities, entrepreneurs, governments and employers from all sectors brace for the unknown scale of changes on the horizon with AI, students and their families should demand that they be given opportunities to develop the skills to use these new, powerful digital tools effectively.
