The Challenge of Connectivity: Pushing Students Beyond Facebook and Twitter

(Summer Tech Programming at St. Stephen’s Youth Programs)
During the school year, our after school program struggled with engaging our middle school students with technology. We live in a generation where students as young as 3rd grade have fancy cellphones, which allow us to be “connected”. Connected online, 24/7, connected with each other 24/7. Think about the numerous twitter or Facebook status and text messages we send daily, or hourly. It has become a comfort zone—we go home, we check our Facebook, we blog, and the list goes on.

Connectivity becomes a dilemma, I think, for educators because children and youth are exposed to all these technological wonders that it is difficult to pull them away from that realm even for ten minutes. A technology specialist I supervised during the recent school year would complain about students disrespecting her because Tech time was being used to learn computer skills such as keyboarding and other activities like doing a budget on Excel, a PowerPoint presentation, basic animation in SCRATCH.

For our summer programming, I was given the task to become the middle school Technology Specialist. Since I am usually the curriculum developer in the after school, I was kind of hesitant to enter the “teacher” role. I dreaded the age group as I am more affable with elementary students. I had three groups: one all incoming 6th graders, next is a combination of incoming 7th and 8th, and last is mostly 8th . On the first day, everyone asked, “What are we doing for Tech?” Before I had the opportunity to answer the question, a pressing question arose, “Can we use Facebook?”

In my mind, I was saying no. I was hoping that the entire lesson I planned for the entire month would work. I answered their query, “I will give a 10-minute free time and you may do whatever you want as long as we are still abiding to the Love Contract (rules and regulations; see attached file) online.”

Our summer technology course focused on creating Glogsters. A fantastic web 2.0 tool, Glogster, allows students to create interactive posters. Students have artistic control on their composition and the content they incorporate in it. They can insert videos, pictures, music, variegated text bubbles and frames. Since I have gleaned the teenagers enthusiasm with being connected, I made them choose a topic they would enjoy working weekly for three weeks and had them researching on seemingly limitless corners of the Internet for information pertinent to their topics.

Students scoured for information about their sports icons (the most popular), films, vacation spots, musicians, favorite things to do, and future goals to put on their Glogs. They perused through Google Images, Youtube videos, online periodicals, Wikipedia, and other websites. We also spent a week not using computers and dabbled in recording video and snapshot photography with our point-and-shoot cameras. Overall, the course finished with exciting Glogs—from amateur to well-designed. I am impressed with their creativity and design abilities.

It is easy to digress from the curriculum when in the classroom they are connected. They love being connected and good things could happen when you endow them with that opportunity. Consider your students’ interests and skills and meet them halfway, and later on challenge them. Be clear with instructions and expectations, have fun, communicate professionally and casually, and be open to developing relationships. Connectivity is problematic but if we allow ourselves to accept that this is a huge part of our students’ lives, we will be less cynical and we can teach them that being connected is not limited to a tweet or facebook status.