7th graders and Computers

Kids never fail to amaze me some days!

We have been in the computer lab today working on PowerPoint presentations on Revolutionary Texans. The students have done 3 days of research on these Texans and two sheets of planning to be prepared to come in the lab and type in their information. I set up a template for them in PowerPoint with all the information that the kids needed to put on each slide so that the kids wouldn't have to try to think to hard on figuring out how to add slides, and formatting them for their text.

Problems I have experience these problems so far in only 3 class periods:
1. When a kid hit the space bar his computer pushed his text to the other side of the screen. I have no idea how the hell he got it to do that, but he was frustrated because he couldn't get it to stop.
2. One girl couldn't get the period button to work. Instead ever time she hit it she got > and that is WITHOUT holding down the shift key.
3. One girl who all over number keys stopped working. I thought this one was simple, just make sure the number lock key was on. It was and still none of the numbers worked. We eventually had to reboot her whole system.

With so much advanced technology today, how is it possible that entire groups of kids do not know how to use a computer. It is very scary what is going to happen when these kids go to high school, college and even the real world and have no clue how to work a computer. I don't know about the rest of you but I think it would be hard to find a job these days that doesn't use a computer system in one way or another.

Sad times for our future indeed.