Minister Simon Birmingham urges school action on IT

Schools must do more to teach computer skills instead of leaving students to dabble with Twitter, Simon Birmingham says.

Schools must do more to teach computer skills instead of leaving students to dabble with Twitter and Facebook, federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said yesterday.

Senator Birmingham said that stud­ents’ mastery of social media would not equip them for work in the digital economy.

“As parents and teachers, we must not just accept that if someone knows how to update their Facebook status, retweet a tweet or Instagram a selfie, they know how to practically use technol­ogy,’’ he said. “There is a need for explicit ­attention to the teaching and learning of digital technology skills.’’

Half the nation’s school stud­ents cannot use a computer properly, national testing has revealed.

Only 55 per cent of Year 6 students and 52 per cent of Year 10 students met the basic “proficient standard’’ in last year’s National Assessment Program for ICT Literacy (NAP-ICT) test.

The poor results — even worse than the 2011 scores — came despite­ the $2 billion spent by the former Rudd/Gillard governments to buy one million laptops for Australian schools.

Senator Birmingham said that “an exclusive focus on IT hardware, as was pursued by the previou­s government, is misplaced’’.

He called on teachers to start using the new curric­ulum for digit­al technologies, endorse­d by state and territory education ministers­ for use next year.