You were born WHEN?!

I currently work in a classroom with third and fourth grade students.  While I am considered young by many of my colleagues, I still often find myself amazed by when the students in my classroom were born.  It's not their ages, as third and fourth grade students are always roughly the same age, between eight and ten, but the fact that not one of them was born in the twentieth century!

When I was born, the internet was already in its most infant stages - an idea of connecting more and more computers over a network.  However, I still grew up without regular access to the internet.  Students in today's schools have never known a world without the internet, and many have not known a world without Facebook.

This means that students are not used to the restrictions of 20th century media mainstays such as television and books.  The buzz word now is interactive! This is supported in all three articles.  In one article, Opening Up Education, the authors claim that "Web 2.0 has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people." (p 14) and I agree with this and would go one step forward.  It's no longer about access to information, but the ability to broadcast your own information.  Growing Up Digital uses the term broadcast as well, and I think that this term, as well as interactive, hit right at the heart of where technology meets education.

Good teachers find a way to plan around the idea that their students are not all the same and have different learning strengths according to Gardner's multiple intelligences.  In the same way that in 1990, teachers were trying to get me to use my hands in lessons, sing songs to remember facts, and discuss in small groups to reinforce concepts through interpersonal communication, the internet allows students in 2011 to manipulate objects, listen to and create podcasts and music, and communicate with millions of people.  If accessing these multiple learning styles is the right way to do teach in a classroom, then mirroring that experience outside of the classroom through creating class activities, networks, and broadcasting projects should be strong reinforcement of information learned in the classroom.

That brings me to my last two reactions to these articles.  Both reference visuals in Growing Up Digital.
The first is the "Knowledge as Iceberg" visual.

This image really hit home for me.  Working in an urban special education environment, I interact with students every day who have not had exposure to the books, stories, world ideas, etc that I would have considered standard for their age.  What I do find though, is that many of my students have built a knowledge base that allows them to access that information.  If they do not know where Egypt is, as it is in the news right now, they know how to go find information on Egypt using a computer.  These skills will serve them well not only in their classroom, but as life-long learners.  Weeding through information to find what is relevant to your query is a skill that this new wired generation will have to learn to excel.

The last point is reacting to the visual of "Web+ as a Transformative Learning Tool".

The authors describe the usefulness of the internet for education as an S curve.  That implies that their will be a leveling out of the quality and accessibility of programs and information on the web.  This will just not be the case.  As new platforms arrive on the scene, we as educators, and "digital immigrants" (Digital Native) must quickly find the best way to incorporate them into our teaching, before they become old news for students