Week 2

Students of today live in a hyper-connected community. The ability to publish their thoughts and ideas and instantly receive feedback is not limited to the occasional opportunity, but it a minute-to-minute reality. And for many, if not most, students this has been their daily reality, thanks to blogging, cell phones, instant messaging, etc., for their entire lives. Multitasking for these students is not second-nature. It is their nature. The intimacy of this interconnectivity has helped to foster a sense of community activism and optimism in members of the Net Generation not seen since the Baby Boomers.

Bringing these students into a traditional classroom and asking them to focus on one subject, sometimes for more than an hour, or to work alone without the benefits of conversation can seem like tedium for them and is an environment ripe for boredom. While most students agree that the face-to-face interaction of a classroom setting is still vital to learning, many teachers fail to account for how technology has changed how these students become engaged in an activity.

There exists a gap between the learning environment of the traditional classroom setting and the learning environment in which today's technologically savvy students live. The fact that most students feel classroom learning is still important illustrates that students are willing to do their part to close the gap on their end. As teachers, we must be willing to close the gap on our end and speak our students' language. Failure to do so will result in failure to engage our students and provide them with any type of learning. This does not necessarily mean that we need simply employ technological gadgets in our classrooms. We must speak a language of confidence in technology and a language in which learning is developed through conversations, both in and out of the classroom; a wide variety of media and convenience. This is summed up perfectly by the quote, "Students should be given the opportunity to interact with faculty and researchers outside the confines of the curriculum and to develop meaningful relationships with them," taken from page 5.8 in the Educause text.

Google Docs is one example of how technology, and free technology at that, can be used to help bridge the gap. This online application transforms he traditional research paper format into a real-time debate with educators and fellow students, as well as, possibly, the entire online, global community. This application also allows students to instantly draw from a wide variety of online media, including web pages and images, through the linking and importing features. And finally, Google Docs speaks to a student's need for convenience by providing a single repository for their work that can be accessed from any place an Internet connection is available at any time.

Just this one application alone has the potential to be a game changer in educators' attempts to reach out and engage their Net Generation students. Given this one example amidst a vast ocean of technologies and ideas, while it may take extra time and effort of the part of teachers, ample tools do exist to make 21st-Century learning a success.