In school districts throughout the country, computer literacy is considered a top educational goal. But too few administrators, teachers, and parents understand what the term really means. What passes for computer literacy in many schools is a shadow of the real thing. To understand why, we need to look at the two roles the computer plays in most schools: information resource and self-contained teaching machine.

As an information resource, the computer can complement books, magazines, videos, and other media. For example, a fourth-grade teacher might augment a unit on animals with an article from a multimedia encyclopedia or other software-based resources. The advent of the CD-ROM, with its large storage capacity, has made such information-based software readily available.

But most educational software is designed to turn computers into teaching machines. A class of programs called integrated learning systems enables a computer to act like a personal tutor in subjects as diverse as reading, writing, mathematics, and foreign languages. Students go through such programs at their own pace, with the software providing lessons, quick feedback, infinite patience, and detailed achievement records.

While these applications of computer technology are commendable, we shouldn't assume that they alone give students a master of computer fundamentals. It's true that the more students use computers, the more comfortable they become with them. But their exposure to computers in these applications is rudimentary and fails to convey the most important skill-how to use the computer as a tool to reach their own ends.

Real computer literacy entails not only good knowledge of hardware components, but an understanding of how an operating system like Microsoft Windows or Mac OS Works. It means knowing how to switch between multiple programs, navigate through a menu structure, change fonts on a document, and create a spreadsheet formula. Most importantly, it means knowing how to go forward when you aren't sure what to do next-using online help along with your own knowledge and intuition.

Real-World Applications

When teaching students how to use the computer as a tool, schools must develop projects that mimic real-world applications. For example, a student could pretend to be an entrepreneur using a spreadsheet to project future sales, a journalist writing an article on word processor, an engineer using a computer-assisted design package to create a new automobile prototype, or a researcher sending e-mail to a colleague in Belgium. These examples all require computer literacy in the truest sense of the term.

What is generally overlooked in our nation's classrooms is that students-even those surprisingly young-can apply computer technology to their learning endeavors. Give kids the right tools in the right contexts, and they will use them effectively-like the eight year old boy who, acting on his own initiative, tracked basketball statistics on a spreadsheet. In a classroom, this student could use that skill to convert Fahrenheit thermometer readings into Centigrade, or meters info feet, or Deutschmarks into dollars.

A class might use a word processor to produce its own newsletter, which not only helps students learn how to write, but to edit someone else's first draft, reformat the text into columns, and insert illustrations. If e-mail is available in the classroom, a girl in an American elementary school might decide on her own to contact her counterpart in Paraguay to find out what she eats for breakfast.

This is not mere speculation. At Brookwood Elementary School, in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at California Elementary School, in Orange County, California, students in a program sponsored by FUTUREKIDS are delving into databases while acting as zoologists cataloging animal species from around the world, or as hospital interns using digital imaging and desktop publishing to create graphic medical charts. In projects like these, the computer is used as a fundamental tool-a practical means to an end.

The Curriculum Is the Key

If we agree that true computer literacy is a worthy goal, how do we achieve it? For starters, computer literacy can't be taught by those who aren't themselves computer-literate, so any successful program must start with solid computer training for teachers. You'll find that once your teachers are up to speed, there's no stopping them. After training, teachers at Brookwood Elementary took 18 K-5 classes through 50-minute weekly lessons that covered everything from the basics of computer hardware through word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and graphics.

To accomplish this, they used a structured computer literacy curriculum that covers 10 technology areas, each with its own grade-specific learning objectives and projects. In the word-processing unit, for example, second and third graders learn the basics of manipulating text, while fifth graders create tables and charts, check grammar and spelling, add headers, footers and page numbers, change margins, set tabs, and view multiple documents. The computer literacy curriculum has more than 700 individual learning objectives.

A good computer curriculum also identifies age-appropriate skills, both in the software it uses and in the exercises it presents. This may require separating parents' desires from realistic expectations. For example, many parents want their children to be familiar with the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web. But younger children tend not to be as enamored of this new medium as their parents. Images can take a long time to load on school computers, and the size of the Web is already so immense that even experienced users have difficulty locating useful educational material.

A less obvious but more gratifying use of the Internet for children is electronic mail. As a message delivery system between people located hundreds or thousands of miles apart, the Internet is cheaper, faster, and often more reliable than the mails-virtues that have made e-mail a major means of communications in the business world.

The Gift that Keeps Giving

Here's the best thing about computer literacy: Once you have it, you can keep on applying it. Technology keeps changing at an alarming pace, and today's elementary school students will be using technology in the 21st century that we are only beginning to imagine. But this technology will evolve from today's hardware and software. Those familiar with today's technology will be able to apply their skills to more advanced applications without having to start from scratch.

Where should computer education be heading? Cindy Caywood, principal of California Elementary, answers: "I want my kids to come out of here saying, 'I'm no afraid of this. I can try this.'" She understands that computer literacy is not so much a set of skills as an attitude, a philosophy, and a sense of self-confidence. Computer-literate people are able to plunge into a new technology, confident that in time they will eventually master it. If we can teach that kind of computer literacy in the classroom, we will have met a fundamental challenge of the Information Age.