Contrasted with what is currently in the hands of their students, the parents’ tales of old technology evoke a sense of awe in the young people present. No wonder. The advancement of technology, and therefore student use of technology, is staggering when one considers that there was indeed a time when telephones weren’t cordless, calculators were HUGE, and the video game “PONG” was considered an amazing piece of entertainment.
Whenever I utilize this process in my trainings, we all laugh. However, it also belies, I believe, a nervousness about our ability as adults to understand, let alone regulate if we dare, our young people’s use of technology. With the advent of new expansive rules governing when schools need to respond to abuse of technology (“cyberbullying”), the need for supervisory staff to become literate in technology is pronounced.
As a curious school attorney, I likely possessed early on a greater understanding of technology than most of my fellow practitioners. But I have still been constantly challenged to keep up, to embrace the new technologies and explore of what they are capable. This is an ongoing process as we keep building smaller devices with more power, more speed, more features, etc.
By way of illustration, when I meet with school staff who are called on to conduct searches of personal technology at school (on reasonable suspicion of a violation of the rules), I ask them how they conduct searches. Often times, they are vague and non-specific as the technology in the possession of students continues to evolve. This is not surprising as their historical role at school did not necessitate a significant, or even minimalist, understanding of personal electronic devices. Conducting searches of backpacks and lockers might have been part of the deal, but searching ever-changing multimedia devices such as smart phones, laptops, or tablets? No way.
But school staff need to educate themselves. So do we all. We need to try to keep up. In order to inspire reporting of students or our children who are the targets of harassment, intimidation or bullying via technology, social media, etc., we must first establish that we know technology and are ready to help with how to approach it safely.
This is a challenge that everyone faces –parents, school staff, social services – as we have things to do in our daily lives that prevents us from using an iPad or a smart phone or understanding the settings and terms of use on our Facebook accounts. A great place to start is to talk to our children or students and solicit their advice. Even if they don’t have a cutting edge new smart phone or laptop, chances are they have tuned their technology to maximum potential. Learn from their experiences on what type of technology is the most popular or desirable and why, how they configure their own devices, and what they encounter when they use them. Then ask how their technology’s settings can be used to limit risk or address conduct of concern.
Who knows? As a result, you may, like me, expand your understanding of technology to a point where it helps your own communication with friends and family as well as work productivity. In the end, our young people may be on to something when they want the stuff.
© Charles Leitch