[Terry Freedman has worked in education for 30 years. Now an independent educational ICT consultant, Terry publishes the ICT in Education website at www.ictineducation.org, and the newsletter “Computers in Classrooms”. He is currently compiling a collection of educational projects which use Web 2.0 applications. If you would like to contribute, please see this article for details.]

Why is this question important?

The days when the only time children learn is when they’re at school, are no longer with us – even assuming they were ever with us. The novelist Mark Twain famously said “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”, and Oscar Wilde asserted that nothing worth knowing can ever be taught. Obviously, each overstated his case for the sake of effect, but we can probably all recognise a grain of truth in these quotations.

These days, youngsters spend a lot of time at computer screens, and seem to have a natural predilection for all things technological. So much so, in fact, that many teachers regard it as axiomatic that their charges know more about using the technology than they do. Unfortunately, however, that assumption does not always affect what is taught in the classroom. In many lessons I have observed, the teacher fails to take into account what the pupils may already know and can do. Consequently, pupils are often bored in ICT lessons.

A 14 year-old girl called Edith recently put this very well at a teachers’ conference. She said that she and her peers were, in effect, being ‘under-taught’. What she meant by this was that whilst they are being taught what they already know, they are not being taught what they do not know. It is sound practice to start from what the pupils know, and build up from there – not only in ICT but in any subject. By taking into account what they already know, and what they do not know, it is possible to tweak the curriculum to better suit their needs, administer meaningful assessment, and thereby, hopefully, raise standards of achievement.

So what DO they already know?

This is the question that Miles Berry[1] and I set out to find out. We felt it was important to try to answer this question because adults often simply assume that youngsters know a lot about technology. If that’s true, there would still be a role for teachers to play in helping them to use it wisely. On the other hand, if it is merely a myth, then teachers have an obligation to teach young people the technology skills they need to know in the 21^st century.

In an online survey conducted by me, I asked teachers to let their classes complete a short questionnaire designed to find out how they used the Internet. More specifically, my intention was to try to find out how they engaged with social networking. The reason that few other countries besides the UK were involved is that the survey was not openly available as such. Because I wanted to ensure, as far as possible, that the data received was genuine, I did not make the URL of the survey form known publicly. Rather, I invited subscribers to my newsletter, Computers in Classrooms, to contact me if they wished their students to take part. Although the spreadsheet in Google Docs might have been used for the survey, I decided instead to use an application which I have had installed on the ICT in Education website. The application lets you build up a survey with various types of field, and to configure an auto responder by email, and/or a redirect to a particular web page.

This is a summary of what I discovered:

On average, the pupils whose average age was 15, belonged to three general social networks and two specific networks, i.e. a social network with a particular focus, such as Flickr or YouTube. I should point out here that I took a very pragmatic view of what a social network actually is. I decided that if a website enabled people to connect with each other in the way that a social networking site such as Facebook did, then it was, in effect, a social network. I have a good precedent for this approach: economists, faced with trying to define what money is, decided in the end to say that ‘money is what money does’. In other words, if something is used as money then it is, to all intents and purposes, money.

The most popular general social network they belonged to was MSN, with Bebo coming a close second. In 3^rd and 4^th places were My Space and Facebook respectively. As far as specific social networks are concerned, the single most popular one identified by the youngsters was YouTube, followed by Flickr, followed by music-sharing sites such as iLike. In fourth place came book-sharing networks such as Shelfari.

The reasons given for joining a social network were even more interesting. In prime position was the desire to learn new things, followed by wanting to collaborate with friends in respect of homework. Only in third place, with relatively few numbers, was the wish to play games.

What emerged from the survey, which involved 766 young people, were the following:

§         Young people spend a lot of time online: it is part of their life.

§         They use it for socialising; with people they already know (especially girls).

§         They use it for homework more than recreational activities like games.

§         They do a lot of multitasking.

Clearly, youngsters feel very at home with this technology. They also had definite views on how it should be treated in schools. Many of them thought that social networking should be allowed in schools, but under supervision. Many also believed that lessons in staying safe online should be given.

Turning to the survey devised by Miles Berry (my role being to comment on the questions proposed), our intention was to find out in more general terms how young people use the technology when they are not in school. For this survey, we received over 1,000 responses in the space of a month or so towards the end of 2008. This is what we discovered:

§         The majority have access to a wide range of technology, including broadband and games consoles.

§         There are gender differences in the choice of technology, as you might expect. For instance, more girls than boys had a mobile phone, whilst more boys than girls had a games console.

§         The top three activities on the Internet were playing games, email, and watching videos, in that order.

§         The top three activities on a computer were playing games, playing music and writing things (stories, diaries, letters, projects and essays). Gender differences again show a similar pattern with games, video editing and programming more popular with boys, writing things, making pictures, presentations and photographs with the girls.

The differences between these results and the first ones cited may be explained by the fact that the average age of the pupils in the second survey was 12, as opposed to 15 in the first one.

Interestingly, one of the questions asked was “How much do you think your teachers know about your use of technology at home?” There was a perception that their teachers really knew very little about how they were using technology out of school – with over a third claiming their teachers knew nothing about this.

So what?

What can we glean from these surveys? You may argue that the results are not valid, because we did not put all the controls in place that an academic research project would have required. Also, the samples may have had built-in biases –for example, the majority of the responses came from pupils in the United Kingdom .

Nevertheless, we regard the results as both interesting in themselves, and as indicative of the benefits to a classroom teacher of carrying out such research on his or her own pupils. Ask yourself: how much do you really know about how your pupils are using technology when you cannot see them? Do you have a budding website designer in your class? Do you, moving away from the technology itself, have someone in your class who does lots of reading and writing on a computer, completely unrelated to school work?

The only way to find out the answers to such questions is to ask. You could use the questions we asked as a starting point, and once you have carried out your research, the results should enable you to fine-tune your teaching to more closely match what your pupils already know, understand and can do.