Generation IM

Getting through to today's teched-out children

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Jacob is your average American 11-year-old. He has a television and a Nintendo DS in his bedroom; his family also has two computers, a wireless Internet connection, and a PlayStation 3. His parents rely on e-mail, instant messaging, and Skype for daily communication, and they’re avid users of Tivo and Netflix. Jacob has asked for a Wii for his upcoming birthday. His selling point? “Mom and Dad, we can use the Wii Fit and race Mario Karts together!”

Most likely, you teach a classroom full of Jacobs. Peggy Sheehy knows what that’s like from firsthand experience. “Outside of school, our children are bombarded with digital input—and they have been since the day they were born,” she says.

As an instructional technology facilitator at Suffern Middle School in New York, Sheehy knows how tech has fundamentally changed the world our students live in—and perhaps our students themselves. “Compared to us, I believe their brains have developed differently,” says Sheehy. “If we teach them the way we were taught, we’re not serving them well.”

And that’s just what many teachers struggle with: How do we teach 21st-century skills to a generation of digital-media natives? What does it mean for our teaching methods and curricula—let alone how we relate to our students? And who are these kids, anyway?

Wired Kids in a Wireless World
When the Kaiser Family Foundation’s study of 8- to 18-year-olds was released in 2005, many of us found the numbers shocking: Young people spend about 6.5 hours a day outside of school using media. That’s more than 44 hours a week reading, surfing the Internet, playing video games, listening to music, and watching TV. And more than a quarter of the time, kids were “media multi-tasking.” Imagine a 13-year-old doing Internet research for a history paper, instant messaging a friend, and listening to music all at the same time, and you’ll get the picture.

Recent reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that 93 percent of youth ages 12–17 go online. Of those kids, 55 percent use social-networking sites (like Facebook and MySpace), and 64 percent are creating their own original content (such as blogs and wikis). Unlike watching television, using the Internet allows young people to take an active role; this move from consumption to participation affects the way they construct knowledge, develop their identity, and communicate with others. “Technology, from my perspective, has created an opportunity for students to use new digital-media resources to express themselves in ways that earlier generations could never have imagined,” says Julie Coiro, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Rhode Island.

Tech and Little Kids
It’s not just teens that are immersed in technology: According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 67 percent of preschool children use computers. In fact, the Zero to Six study in the U.S. and the Digital Beginnings study in the U.K. show that children under 6 spend an average of two hours a day in front of the screen. Researchers at the University of Westminster in London found that the ability to create content on Web sites was what appealed to children under 12 as well; they discovered that children relished the chance to create their own music, cartoons, and videos. It’s these stimulating and interactive features that may give new digital media an edge over more passive media.

Media in the 21st Century
If our kids are wired, what exactly are they wired to? They’re connecting to the Internet—and to each other—through video games, online forums, blogs, and wikis. They’re making podcasts, creating films, producing machinima, and writing fan fiction. They’re using concept-mapping software such as Kidspiration, and they’re experimenting with new online interactive tools like VoiceThread and social-networking sites like Teen Second Life and Twitter.

Ten years ago, our students may have begun a research project by opening an encyclopedia and flipping through the pages. Today, they’re more likely to access Wikipedia online—and then eventually edit the Web page with new information that they uncover in the course of their research. In the past, teachers may have partnered with other educators across the country for a geography project, perhaps through the use of pen pals. Now those same teachers can have their students work with others halfway around the world on a joint endeavor, aided by blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds. This kind of innovative use of digital media is changing the ways that we think about collaboration, agency, and authorship. But more than that, it’s challenging the ways that we conceive of the learning process. In a digital age, we simply cannot measure a child’s knowledge through an isolated, fact-driven standardized test.

Critical Thinking 2.0
While fears of online predators and cyber bullying have made many adults wary, the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s Web site states that “despite the potential known and unknown dangers of going online, this technology can be useful to develop literacy, cognitive, and social skills.”

These same skills, however, are transforming in a digital age. “It’s a shift from how to memorize and retrieve data in one’s mind to how to search for and evaluate information out in the world,” says Barry Joseph, director of the online leadership program at Global Kids, a nonprofit organization in New York City. “At the core, this means that to be a good student, one needs to be less a rote learner and more a critical thinker.”

Julie Coiro knows this firsthand. She’s the coeditor of the Handbook of Research in New Literacies; one of her recent studies has shown that part of thinking critically means knowing how to access and comprehend information online. “Typically, students who have little prior knowledge about a topic have difficulty comprehending new information they find about it, compared to students with higher levels of prior knowledge,” she explains. However, she found that students who can use a search engine to “fill the gaps” in important background information were no longer at such a disadvantage. “In some cases, they are able to use the Internet to quickly locate easier texts written for students their age, a simple definition, or related images and videos, and then they can keep reading,” Coiro says.

David Williamson Shaffer, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin and author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn, believes that technology isn’t useful just because you can accomplish the same tasks that you could without it. “Computers give you different ways to solve problems, the opportunity to run and test simulations, and a way to offload processing,” he states.

As long as our primary goal is to teach basic skills—and assess them through standardized tests—skill-and-drill exercises are sufficient. “But that approach doesn’t take advantage of the available technology or prepare our students for the world they’re going to face,” Shaffer argues. “We need kids to think about problems in innovative and creative ways. We need to change the emphasis of education to focus on higher-order kinds of thinking.

Taking Action
When it comes to digital media, many kids are putting time and effort into meaningful work, developing their literacy skills, and enriching their content-area knowledge through collaboration with peers and mentors alike. As teachers, we couldn’t ask for anything more. So what’s stopping us from integrating digital media into our classrooms?

Allison Needham, a fifth-grade teacher in Virginia, says that it often comes down to time and resources. “Teacher resistance can be an issue, but it’s not necessarily because teachers are afraid of technology. Demands are constantly put upon teachers, draining time and energy that they’d rather spend on actual instruction,” she explains. Earlier this year, Needham was awarded the National Science Teacher Association’s Vernier Award. While she’s received national recognition for her innovative uses of technology, she also feels overwhelmed at times by all of the options available. “I’ve put off learning about some things that I’m very interested in because I simply don’t have the time to learn about them well enough to use them in the classroom,” Needham says.

Catching Teachers Up
This is something that Jim Gates hears a lot. As a coach for Pennsylvania’s Classrooms for the Future project, he works to make technology available to students and teachers. He’s also a blogger himself at www.tipline.blogspot.com. “There’s a growing disconnect between how kids embrace technology and where teachers’ skill levels are,” he says.

Coiro identifies three main barriers to integrating digital media more fully into schools:
1) a lack of quality professional development for teachers;
2) a lack of time to explore, apply, and reflect with colleagues on the challenges and potentials of integrating any type of technology into the classroom culture; and
3) limited administrative support about how to use technology effectively to empower learners.

Many experts agree digital media is valuable to schools because it engenders new ways of learning, thinking, and communicating. For teachers, these changes have significant implications for how we teach—not just who we teach. “We need to look for examples of how our students are using technology, how they’re doing innovative work, and how they’re engaging with the world around them. We need to use technology in compelling and progressive ways,” says Shaffer. “If we fail to do so, kids are going to look at what’s going on in schools and see that it is irrelevant.”

A Universe of Potential
Virtual worlds can offer students a rich learning environment that isn’t as high stakes as “real world” school. Suffern’s Sheehy works with many special-education teachers who love using Second Life. “In a virtual world, the playing field is truly leveled,” she explains. “Even if we’re duplicating a real-life scenario in a virtual environment, the fact that students are engaged with technology and performing through a semblance of anonymity lends itself to a deeper level of discourse.”

Sheehy’s school district now owns six islands on the teen grid of Second Life, and she blogs about their experience at ramapoislands.edublogs.org . Under Sheehy’s guidance, 1,200 students and 40 teachers have been trained to use Second Life. “Remember the saying ‘It takes a village to raise a child?’ ” she asks. “Now, it takes a metaverse.”

 

1. Have your students blog.
Mary Kreul, a fourth-grade teacher in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, has two blogs—one with scheduling information and homework assignments that students and parents can use as a resource, and the other where students can post book reviews, creative writing, and even original podcasts. Why blog? Ms. Kreul notes that it’s far easier to contribute to and maintain a blog than a Web site. Parents like to send links to their children’s work to Grandma or to relatives overseas. And as for the kids, they love having an audience. Kreul notes that her students are enthusiastic about blogging because their work exists beyond the classroom. “The best thing is that the kids know that somebody is reading their work. That authentic audience is so powerful,” she says.

Kreul hosts her administrative blog at www.edublogs.org and her student-written blog at www.classblogmeister.com .  Classblogmeister allows students to post from home, but it is great for teachers, too, because they can read and approve each post before it goes live on the site. Both sites have no advertising and are free to use.

Instead of making the blog password-protected, Kreul protects her student’s identities by having them post under their initials only. Other teachers use protective methods as well, from using first names only to identifying kids by hand-drawn self-portraits or photographs of the backs of their heads.

2. Create a Social Network.
Andrew Gardner, a technology teacher in Manhattan, has created social networks for sixth- through eighth-grade students at his school. Gardner concedes that Facebook can become an open forum for students to harass each other, but agues that an in-house version can serve several educational purposes. Students who create personal profiles on Gardner’s social-networking site learn to connect over shared interests and leave respectful, constructive comments for one another before they’re even old enough to have a home Facebook account (Facebook is for 13 years and up; MySpace starts at 14).

The students aren’t the only ones with profiles, however. The sixth graders chose characters from assigned novels like Haroun and the Sea of Stories and My Brother Sam Is Dead and created profiles for them—adding pictures, likes and dislikes, and even blog entries from their chosen character’s point of view.Gardner created his school’s password-protected social network
by using free, open-source social-networking software from Elgg. If you can’t host a social network from your school’s Web site, however, social-networking resource Ning allows teachers to create free, ad-free social networks for seventh and eighth graders. (To learn how to do it, go to education.ning.com).

3. Podcast.
Angie Henderson, the technology teacher at an elementary school in Gaithersburg, Maryland, works with Gundry Rowe, the school’s media specialist, to record student-created podcasts and post them on the school’s Web site. Rowe notes that the audio files the students create may not count as “real” podcasts, since they’re not syndicated over an RSS feed, but says that students are really engaged with the format nonetheless. Last year, fourth and fifth graders at the school made podcasts sharing the research they had done on the Revolutionary War, with different students taking ownership of particular subjects like the Boston Tea Party and the Articles of Confederation.

Henderson uses the free, open-source sound-editing software Audacity to edit the digital sound files that students record. Mac users can also use the Garage Band software that comes on every computer to create podcasts. Don’t have computers with microphones? Gabcast offers free accounts that let users create podcasts via a phone call to an 800 number. You can then post the files to any blog, though Gabcast will also host them for you, for a price.

4. Use wikis for big projects.
Though blogs may be the easiest Web sites to maintain, they’re not great for large, collaborative class projects that sort a lot of information onto separate Web pages. For that, it may be easiest to have kids contribute to a wiki. It’s a great way to make a large Web site without knowing html or Web design. Nancy Bosch teaches gifted fourth through sixth graders at an enhanced learning center in Shawnee, Kansas. Her students collaborated on a wiki this year called Arrrpirates, where they posted their reports on the history of piracy. The wiki format lets them easily link to each other’s work using the same collaborative method and internal linking that you see on Wikipedia (though the students were not allowed to use Wikipedia in their research!).

Bosch’s students made their wiki on wikispaces, which right now is providing free, ad-free private wiki hosting to the first 100,000 K–12 teachers who request it. (At time of writing, there were more than 21,000 spots left. The service normally costs $50/year.)

5. Try social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking is a great way to share online resources with students, parents, and other teachers. The Goochland County (VA) Public School District has a del.icio.us account that’s shared among the district’s six schools. When a teacher finds a Web site that she wants to share, she can send it to her school’s media specialist with relevant tags, and the specialist will add it to the county’s account. The account currently has more than 530 bookmarks. It’s quick and easy to search for ones that are relevant to you—just click the “french” or “grammar” tag, and of those hundreds of bookmarks only the relevant sites (often as few as two or three) will pop up.

You don’t have to go districtwide to take advantage of social bookmarking, however. Create your own del.icio.us account and make it your classroom’s home page so students can navigate to your favorite Web sites easily. Once they have your user name, they can track your bookmarks from home or the library as well.

6. Post video.
Nathaniel Balcom, a fourth-grade teacher in Grand Island, Nebraska, encouraged his students to create video “discussions” of each chapter of Surviving the Applewhites. In the videos, students summarize a chapter of the book and raise several discussion questions about that chapter. Balcom also sent a link to the videos to all the parents in the class.Balcom edited the videos on Apple’s iMovie, created fun intro credits on Animoto, and posted the results on TeacherTube, a YouTube-style online video-hosting site without the inappropriate content present on YouTube. Unlike most of the Web sites mentioned here, TeacherTube is advertising-supported, though none of the sponsors is inappropriate for a classroom setting.

Not a Mac user? There are plenty of open-source video-editing programs that work on Windows and Linux, including Avidemux and VirtualDub

7. Explore with google maps.
Who doesn’t love Google Maps? With a little creativity, Google’s mapping resource can be useful for more than just locating Azerbaijan. Gardner’s Manhattan-based fifth graders made an in-depth Google map this year to track the locations of Odysseus’s journey around southern Europe. At each major stop (including Troy, Sardinia, and Tunisia), students included an illustration and a description of what happens at that point in Odysseus’s journey. Students also used Google Maps to find all of the major buildings for the Beijing Olympics and then created virtual 3D models of the buildings using Google SketchUp, an architechture program that makes creating such models easy and intuitive.

 

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