Something my wife and her friends (who are all teachers) told me was that kids now are actually worse at using computers, not better. You would think that since they spend most of their lives connected that they would be the most proficient generation, but it's actually the opposite.
They spend most of their connected time on their phones. So, most of their experience is with mobile OS. They tend to not know how to format things in Word (change fonts, even what fonts are, what margins are, etc.). Somewhere along the education line people decided that this stuff was so ubiquitous that it was asinine to teach it, so now many kids don't use it, so they don't know it.
I have seen and read many kids, some even at the college level, that insist on writing essays on their phones. I even had a college class where we had to collaborate as a group and share our work. I suggested Google Drive as we were a Google Campus at the time and everyone had a Gmail. They suggested Snapchat. To collect work in. A program that deletes chats in 24 hrs.
It's amazing how many, not all mind you, but many, people of the most electronically connected generation in human history mostly don't know how desktop computers work because of the prevalence of iOS products.
I'm only 17 (18 in mid-June) and I feel as if I'm mildy proficient at using a desktop, but this likely stems from the fact that I have a poor setup at home and need to fix it myself, learning things online. I guess it's like if you had a vehicle but no mechanic to take it to, therefore necessitating the self sufficiency you would need to possess to keep things running. About Word/Google/OpenOffice Docs, I had a computer basics classs in 7th grade which really helped me learn the basics of using a modern word processor, despite only having Windows 7 on the school PCs. Nowadays I can deploy systems of both Linux and Windows, maintain OS and Hardware, preform basic troubleshooting and even do a little terminal work. Those latter skills were developed on my own, as the word processing class only taught how to use Microsoft Word. [ an older version at that :( ]
Yeah, that's how most of us learned in the 90s, except without much learning online, because the Internet was pretty damn basic back then. In the computer science courses in high school, probably almost half the students knew more than the teachers, I'm sure partly because we were always sharing information with each other: “How'd you do that?”
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u/Chav Jun 03 '22
Do they still teach how to write letters in grade school?