Teaching 21

st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 1









Teaching 21
st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students
Allison Lybarger
University of Western Oregon
Teaching 21
st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 2

Most middle school students have plenty experience interacting with
technology by the time they use it in the classroom. Facebook, Instagram,
text messaging, and many more forms of social media are all normal in this
day and age for youth to have access to. Many students are getting cell
phones as young as 10-years-old or even younger. Technology is the past, it
is the present and it is the future. It has created change that we would have
never imagined 50 years ago and with that change, has come many
successes and many demises. As Dougas Rushkoff asserts in Present Shock,
audiences are now becoming reliant on excerpts and immediate information.
Society no longer has interest in investing time and energy into texts and is
often satisfied with just skimming and scanning. But what does that do to
our future generations? Is the education system allowing the level of
expression, original thought and the approach to learning to regress? Its not
the skills that educators should focus on, its the way in which we are
allowing and teaching our youth to use and interact with technology and
social media. Teaching 21
st
century technological skills and lessons to middle
school students involves practice, patience and creativity.
Practice.
In order to become truly proficient at a skill, students need hours and
hours of practice. Malcolm Gladwell, a research journalist wrote a novel
titled, Outliers. In this book, he affirms the idea that exceptional people in
their professions have two things in common. One, they are exposed to a
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st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 3

unique opportunity at the right time, and two, this opportunity leads them to
the ability to have practiced a skill for over 10,000 hourssetting them
greatly apart from their counterparts. The point to be made here is not to
have students spend 10,000 hours using technology; it is indeed that they
must practice the skills and have the opportunity to do so in the right
capacity. Middle school students need instruction navigating the internet,
making safe choices, finding valuable and credible informationand then,
doing something with that new information.
It is one thing to tell a student to go look it up but, are
educators giving them the right tools to be successful and find the most
appropriate information as well as the ability to expand upon and apply this
new information to new domains. In addition, students need boundaries;
they need expectations and they need supervision.
Some of the ideas represented in Ken Robinsons Out of Our Minds:
Learning to be Creative describes the two worlds in which we live. On world
containing the self, ones own thoughts, feelings and emotions. And another
world that will exist beyond our own lives. We have to practice a balance
within our lives to keep these two worlds living harmoniously together. This
is often hard for youth to recognize and to keep at an equilibrium because it
is not innate in our development without practice.
Patience
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st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 4

Patience is the second virtue in teaching 21
st
century technology skills
to middle school students. Rushkoff, author of Present Shock describes our
society as one in which everything is happening so fast that it may as well
be simultaneous. One big now (2014). His main argument across the board
is that there is no time for context. In education, that means that students
arent able to successfully master a skill or grasp a concept in order to apply
it to a new one. If society is constantly moving forward and not allowing
youth to take time to embrace and learn from the present, then our students
cannot be expected to be innovative and create genuine ideas. This idea of
patience in technology stems from the way our world has transitioned into a
whats next? society. The internet allows us to have unlimited knowledge
at our fingertips, but it is the practice of and the persistence that gives us
the ability to make change or to expand upon new ideas. Patience. A hard
word to drive into a teenagers brain. But, necessary in real world situations.
Its teaching the appropriate timing of conversations, is an email or a face to
face conversation more appropriate? Should you settle for the first Google
result or take the time to identify if the information is accurate and credible?
As we raise these questions, the key word is patience. Teaching students to
slow down, to live in the moment and to take accountability for the
information they are gathering. Not only that, but to be present in the
moment. Sometimes technology can wait. Sometimes its unavailable, and
sometimes its inappropriate. To teach the value of friendship, or
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st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 5

conversation is essential to creating well balanced, well rounded youth that
will change our future in more ways that we can possibly imagine.
Creativity
The last staple component in teaching middle school students to be
successful tech-savvy kids is creativity. The most broad idea and the most
important all the same. Creativity, defined by Ken Robinson, has three main
components: imagination, creativity and innovation. Imagination is bringing
new ideas to mind that are not currently present to our senses. Creativity is
developing original ideas that have value and innovation is putting these
new ideas into practice (Robinson p. 2).
Ken Robinson recognizes that talent is diverse, we are not trying to
turn our youth into robots, but rather to challenge them to be individuals
and to think for themselves. He asserts that each learning experience is
personal; It is shaped by the ideas beliefs and values that we derive from
our [personal] experiences and through the meaning which we derive from
them (Robinson). When organized systems of schools begin to embrace
these ideas and transform the outdated paradigm of learning to new schools
of creativity, imagination and innovation then we will begin to see a change
in our society. With our world changing as fast as it is-- along with our
expectations, life-style and culture, educators have been considering the
need for a new way of thinking about education now for a number of years.
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st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 6

But what changes are actually happening? Ken Robinson asserts that the
past is all history and to try to continue living in it will lead to a collapse in
our society or at least a seismic fall. So, what is the only way of learning to
accommodate the rapidly changing world? The answer lies in the way we
look at ourselves, how we raise and educate our future generations and how
we accept and implement the need for creativity, imagination and innovation
in our schools, in our society and in our people.
Chris Ruen, author of Freeloading also discusses the aspect of
creativity in education. Freeloading, the illegal downloading of other peoples
work is starving creativity. This is so important in education because our
students are exposed constantly and have access to so much information,
media and ideas. The way we teach students to use this information, to
expand on others ideas and to inspire themselves is a major factor in their
educational journey. With so much information available to us, and to our
students, it is important to teach them to use it in appropriate ways, to give
credit where credit is due and to use other people as inspiration. Not only
that, but creativity is limited when our ideas are bound to other peoples
imaginations.
In addition, in Daniel Pinks book, A Whole New Mind, he claims that
right brain thinkers will rule the future. Our world is changing and the
focus of education is reshaping with new emphasis on the balance of the
right and left brain. The importance of right brain thinking when talking
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st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 7

about creativity is essentialstudents ability to think beyond what is set in
front of them. Their ability to apply old information to new contexts, their
ability to be okay with failure and to learn from it. All of these things
emphasize the importance of creativity in education and how technology
should be used as a tool, rather than a source.
Teaching 21
st
century technology to middle school students, practically
speaking, is quite easy. They pick up on navigation techniques and shortcuts
faster than they are created. They can often type very quickly from a young
age and have ease navigating the mouse, keyboard and programs. The
difficult part in teaching these 21
st
century technological skills to middle
school students is teaching them in a way that creates new thinking and
produces a future generation capable of original thought and innovation. To
do that, educators need to think in three ways, they need to allow time for
students to practice; to practice using the technology effectively, to practice
finding multiple ways to solve problemsboth with or without technology,
and to practice the humanitarian skills that our society so desperately needs.
Educators need to have patience. Patience in terms of slowing down the
pace of life, accepting that information has not always been readily available
at our fingers, and patience to make safe choices, and create meaningful
work. Lastly, educators need to emphasize creativity. The most essential of
the three, creativity is our future and will always be. To push our students
beyond what they already know, beyond what they can research and beyond
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st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 8

what they can dream of. With practice, patience and creativity in educational
technology, our future generations will become successful creators and
citizens capable of leading us to new ways of thinking.





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st
Century Technology Skills to Middle School Students 9

Resources
Azzam, Amy M. (2009). Why Creativity Now? Retrieved from
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-
leadership/sept09/vol67/num01/Why-Creativity-Now%C2%A2-A-
Conversation-with-Sir-Ken-Robinson.aspx
Gladwell, Malcolm. (2008). Outliers. New York. Little, Brown and Co.
Pink, Daniel. (2005). A Whole New Mind: Why right-brainers will rule the
future. New York, NY. Penguin Group.
Robinson, Ken. (2001). Out of Our Mind: Learning to be creative. United
Kingdom. Capstone Publishing Ltd.
Ruen, Chris. (2012). Freeloading: How our insatiable hunger for free content
starves creativity. New York, NY. OR Books.
Rushkoff , Dougas. (2013). Present Shock: When everything happens now.
New York, NY. Penguin Group.
Rushkoff , Dougas. How Technology Killed the Future. Retrieved from:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/how-technology-killed-
the-future-102236.html#.U5Zrv_ldUY1
Thompson, Clive. (2013). Smarter Than You Think: How technology is
changing our minds for the better. USA. Penguin Random House Company.