It’s just as well that my children were born before the smartphone era, before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr or Snapchat. The kids would have been left to their own devices, toddling through the park eating tanbark and snails while I thumbed my phone screen like a rosary, looking up only if I heard the ear-splitting scream that signifies an injured child.
While I ignored them in real life, I’d be busy invading their privacy online: posting bathtub pictures, fishing for “likes” by recounting their mangled attempts at language, or bragging about their developmental milestones.
Even now, I’m the hypocritical mom who scolds my teen daughter, “You’ve spent enough time online today,” while clutching my own phone in my hand.
Despite my addiction to social media and online news, I’m pretty restrictive with my children. We own a Wii game system only because I accidentally won a bidding war while trying to figure out how Ebay works.
The kids have acquired a few hand-me-down handheld games and second-hand iPods, and somehow we have more e-readers than people who read in my house. As more schools adopt bring-your-own-device policies, I bite my tongue and let my children slide into the 21st century.
When I learned that having a Tumblr account was a requirement for my daughter’s high school Advanced Placement English class, I argued with the teacher, briefly and weakly, and then gave in.
I saw her point: digital communication is the wave of the future, and students need to learn how to present themselves effectively online, how to navigate potential pitfalls, and how their words will be used by others.
Under the watchful eye of a teacher, for a grade, is not a bad way to practice those skills, and I enjoyed observing my daughter’s online persona develop.
Watching my children go digital has provided pleasant surprises.
My son downloaded an accordion app and is teaching himself to play the accordion on the family tablet.
My daughter learned to play the ukulele using Youtube.
Online hair tutorials save us from teen angst, math tutorials help us through late-night homework. Sometimes arguments are solved and touchy subjects are handled better through messaging or text than face-to-face, especially when tempers are frayed.
As a teacher, I begin each school year by asking my students if they have Internet access outside of class. In a school where nearly one-third of the students are classified as homeless, it’s certainly not a given.
It’s helpful to know whether I can assign computer-based homework, which parents prefer to be contacted by email, and who doesn’t finish homework because they’re spending hours playing “Mafia Wars” on Facebook.
Even in a school where poverty is a reality, by fifth grade, many children have iPods or tablets, and it’s not rare to find a student with a nicer phone than mine.
Much has been written about the digital divide. School districts throughout the country launch ambitious plans to give low-income children iPads or Chromebooks. The hope is that students will then spend their free hours using educational programs, reading e-books or researching topics of interest, and certainly some children do. I’m always pleasantly surprised when children come into class bursting with information about something they investigated independently.
For most children, however, Internet access isn’t enough to bridge the digital divide. Having knowledge at one’s fingertips isn’t the same as knowing how to use it. In fact, according to “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” a recently-published book by Robert Putnam, access to the Internet has “not leveled the playing field at all in terms of the difference between rich kids and poor kids.” He goes so far as to say that poor children use the Internet “in mindless ways” that don’t advance their education or professional life. They don’t develop the vast circle of contacts that rich children have, contacts that later usher them into the world of education and then business.
While kids across the economic spectrum waste equal amounts of time on YouTube, a gap remains and even grows.
What does this mean for parents, teachers or policy-makers? It doesn’t mean I’ll be abandoning social media and, to my daughter’s relief, it doesn’t mean I’ll be dragging her off Snapchat or checking her Tumblr posts for intelligent content.
It does mean that our definition of computer literacy may change.
It’s no longer enough to make my students earn 500 points on a math program or look up why Pluto is no longer a planet.
It doesn’t mean that every student needs an iPad, but instead, that every child knows how to use that iPad in intelligent ways, ways that build bridges toward their futures. The digital highway, like all highways, can be a tool for mobility if we teach children to navigate it well.
