💻📱Adolescent Interview📺📹

I decided to interview two students, one male and one female. For the purposes of this blog we’ll call them Kyle and Alexa. (Alias is one of our vocabulary words so I let them choose their aliases!) I interviewed them at the same time. Posing questions to one or the other and then allowing them to bounce off one another to answer the questions on a deeper level and to see what shared experiences they might have. Honestly this took about 45 minutes and we were still chatting as the bell rang! These friends had a lot to say, as middle schoolers typically do! Alexa does not have a cell phone but she does have a tablet with access to Kids Messenger and YouTube. She also has a TV in her room, an Alexa, and on rare occasions, access to her parents’ phones. Kyle on the other hand does have a cell phone, an XBox, PlayStation, a tablet, a TV, and an Alexa. Both students however have school issued Chromebooks that they use in school. Kyle and Alexa also use YouTube and Messenger/text messaging as their main forms of communication in terms of technology. Kyle also stated that he also will play video games and chat with his friends over the headsets. Alexa said that sometimes she videochats her friends and they talk and dance to Taylor Swift. 

I learned a lot about their experiences with technology throughout the COVID Pandemic. They were both in first grade when they went remote. What was interesting to me is that the district only provided students with devices if they did not already have one at home. Kyle had a computer at home, Alexa did not. So, the school provided her with a tablet. They both communicated that ZOOM was their main form of education at that time. They both expressed extreme frustration with the technical difficulties and how their teachers spent most of the time trying to get the attention of their classmates and there was not much teaching done for the rest of first grade. Kyle went back to school when the hybrid cycles started in second grade but Alexa continued to be remote throughout all of second grade. Instead of having the same teachers all day like a traditional second grade classroom, teachers would dedicate themself to one content area and rotate students allowing them to also spend a period with the remote students. They had many of the same teachers and there were fewer students and glitches on ZOOM. At this point, the school had also issued 1:1 devices so Alexa had a Chromebook at school and Kyle had one in the classroom. They both were back to “normal” in 3rd grade and said that they have been using Chromebooks and tablets in school since the pandemic. Now more than ever being in Middle School. I asked them what else they’d like to see in the classroom in regards to technology and Kyle mentioned that he liked the idea of talking about current events and looking at online news articles and videos. He suggested I make slides for every Friday and we spend the English class talking about what’s going on in the world right now. It’s definitely something I’m looking into! Maybe he can create the slides for me and kids can take turns being news reporters? 

            I chose Kyle and Alexa intentionally as I believe that they’re more mature than most of their classmates and I believed that they would be able to give me input on their own experiences and their experiences with their peers’ usage of technology and social media. I was honestly surprised at how much thought these students have already put into technology and social media. Kyle even made the statement right off the bat that he does his best to not allow himself to be addicted to screens because he sees how it impacts most of his friends. Alexa immediately agreed. Although she’s not happy that she does not have a phone, she does understand that some of her friends have an unhealthy relationship with technology. Without prompting, Kyle also shared a story about his friends wholeheartedly believing in conspiracy theories and misinformation that they see, specifically on TikTok. As my 6th grade student said so well, “They see like, one video and BOOM! They literally believe it. Just the other day they told me Micheal Jackson wasn’t real because they watched a video. How crazy is that!?” My response? “Literally so crazy!” (Alexa then proclaimed her frustration about how none of her friends have seen Golden Girls because they spend too much time on their phones and she thinks that’s crazy.) I also prompted Kyle about how he approaches his friends when they spread these false truths. He said that he just ignores them and that he will often just ignore online content that he knows is not true. Alexa said she also calls her friends out on unbelievable things they see and believe from social media. I was surprised at just how much they already knew about new media and new literacies. Upon talking to these students, they described technology as fun but also a tool. They’re both really into computers and coding and they like to create and play games online. One area they did seem to note their friends lacking in was research. They said that they can recognize true and false information and reliable sources, but many of their peers tend to not question what they see. This was something that I as an adult realized, but for students to be recognizing it is so encouraging. I explained to them the premise of this class and let them know that they should encourage their friends to look up outlandish ideas and assist them in finding reliable sources - “NOT Wikipedia!” as Alexa correctly stated! This also leads me to understand that I need to do a lesson with this as well to reinforce these ideas. What I’m thinking I could do is find and or create social media content that’s completely false and challenge my students to prove to me that I’m wrong. Practicing this skill in the classroom will hopefully encourage them to question all that they see online.