Students today live in a very face paced world. It is a world I could have never imagined when I was in high school. Information is literally at their fingertips, or a button click away. The majority of the education that they get, or learn from their teachers, can be found with a google search in a fraction of a second. They don’t need a teacher to present vocabulary, terms, or simple questions anymore. Those are the kind of information that they can look up faster than we as teachers can deliver it to them. Students today are also multitaskers, or more realistically they have “continuous partial attention.” Meaning, they have the ability to do multiple things at once. Not saying they do those multiple things better than if they were to focus on one item, but they are conditioned to be listening to music, reading a book, and checking a blog all at the same time. Wagner sees this not as a decline in students work ethic, but as a different type of ethic. Students today want to incorporate all of the resources they have and not feel restricted or have those resources refused to them. And I agree, that students need to be able to have access to any resource that they can get their hands on. Not only will it educate them on how to use the resource, but also get them to learn about the content, in their own way. If we want to educated our students in the way of tomorrow, we will need to teach them how to use all the resources they can, and build the skills that they need to participate in this new and unknown world. We need to tap into how students learn, mainly with the use of digital communities and Web 2.0 programs like YouTube.com. If we can get the students using these programs in our classroom, then we as teachers, can move to more of a facilitator role, rather than the source of all information. Students know that we do not have all the answers. They know that they can find anything we teach them online. What students need from teachers is to be shown how to use the information they look up, to solve problems that they might encounter in college or the work force. We need to be examples, not just give them.
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May 2015
Kyle HutchinsTeacher Candidate at Cal State San Marcos. Currently doing clinical practice at Orange Glen High School in Escondido. Categories |