Students as Problem Solvers

From a post by third grade teacher Mark Ahlness:

Today I had a serious problem with network connectivity in my classroom - I think the network folk were working on stuff. We couldn't get to our local network consistently (e.g, no printing or saving). I watched one of my third graders solve a problem in a way that just made me shake my head in wonder. She was typing in Word - wanted to print, but could not - and could not save to her network folder. But she had Internet access. There was only one computer in the room that had access to our printer at that time. She turned to me and said, "Couldn't I just copy and paste this to my blog - like not ask for it to be published or anything? Just save it there.... and then I could go to that other computer that can print, log on to my blog, open that saved article, copy and paste my writing from my blog article into Word - and then print? Like, would that work?"Like, my goodness. What comes so naturally to our nine year olds these days. Of course it worked.

I'd have to say she's a digital native. This is what I'd like our students to become. Not necessarily technology experts (not that there's anything wrong with that), but students that are comfortable enough with technology that they can be problem solvers. Not necessarily problem solvers in the sense of solving technology problems (not that there's anything wrong with that, either), but more importantly having the confidence and the background knowledge to go after problems themselves, not always looking to the teacher for the solution.

How many of our high school students would've thought of that solution? How many of our staff?