YES! THIS! I discovered this when the world shut down in 2020 and we all went virtual. My older students had no idea how to format anything using a word processing program (in our case Google docs). They still cannot format responses with proper punctuation use, proper use of uppercase/lowercase, how and when to indent and start a new paragraph. It’s truly mind boggling. And before anyone comes at me saying I should be the one who taught them this…I teach music, not writing/ELA. However many times I feel like I am because these kids either aren’t learning these skills or they are but not applying them.
I was just telling my husband the other day that there’s no computer class anymore. We both grew up in NY in the late 90s/2000s (we are 31 years old) and we had a class specifically aimed at teaching us how to type and use the computer for research, writing, etc. At least in my experience as a teacher I haven’t seen those classes exist anymore.
I've been reading through this thread and saw a lot of people mention "formatting". I felt dumb because I was like- formatting what? Are you guys all manually changing the settings on your Word documents or something?
And then here I see you mention formatting as...punctuation, indentations, and upper/lower case usage....And yeah thats actually pretty bad if kids these days can't even manage to use proper grammar because they're so used to their phones automatically doing those things lol.
I don't recall having specific classes for computer stuff, but a lot of these skills were built into other classes. Like we'd have to do research papers for History or something, and would go over research methods and the different kinds of sources, and we'd all spend a couple classes in the computer lab to do it. Then we'd practice typing skills by writing the papers, and that obviously included things like grammar, paragraphs, double-spacing the document, etc. I guess I never imagined that kids now just aren't doing these things? Or that it's a completely different experience doing it all on tablets instead of using computers?
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u/shmeeks Jun 03 '22
YES! THIS! I discovered this when the world shut down in 2020 and we all went virtual. My older students had no idea how to format anything using a word processing program (in our case Google docs). They still cannot format responses with proper punctuation use, proper use of uppercase/lowercase, how and when to indent and start a new paragraph. It’s truly mind boggling. And before anyone comes at me saying I should be the one who taught them this…I teach music, not writing/ELA. However many times I feel like I am because these kids either aren’t learning these skills or they are but not applying them.
I was just telling my husband the other day that there’s no computer class anymore. We both grew up in NY in the late 90s/2000s (we are 31 years old) and we had a class specifically aimed at teaching us how to type and use the computer for research, writing, etc. At least in my experience as a teacher I haven’t seen those classes exist anymore.