{"id":2201,"date":"2013-01-28T09:25:14","date_gmt":"2013-01-28T09:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/?p=2201"},"modified":"2013-01-28T09:25:14","modified_gmt":"2013-01-28T09:25:14","slug":"the-young-learners-issue-1-adam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/2013\/01\/28\/the-young-learners-issue-1-adam\/","title":{"rendered":"The Young Learners Issue #1 – Adam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leveraging Young Learners\u2019 Use of Technology\"ADAMSimpson150x150\"<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

Young learners born between Generation Y and Z have grown up with technology that helps them engage with a constant flow of information and data. Yet the constant question from early 21st<\/sup> century teachers is, \u2018How can we adopt technology in our classes in a meaningful way that facilitates learning?\u2019 This is a good question we should ask whenever we use tech in our teaching, but it\u2019s easily answered if we leverage the ways our learners are already interacting daily with technology. Here are five ideas that might help.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be afraid of technology<\/strong>
\nAlthough YLs are most commonly described as tech savvy<\/i>, I have trouble with this term as I feel it poorly depicts their true interactions with technology. What I have come to understand is that our young learners are actually tech comfy,<\/i> rather than tech savvy. <\/i>Realizing this,we can overcome our own fears of technology and adopt the tools they already use to facilitate learning.<\/p>\n

\"Adam<\/a><\/p>\n

Teach proper search skills<\/strong><\/p>\n

By 2006 about 90% of young Westerners used Internet search engines. It\u2019s now virtually 100% with an ease-of-use mentality<\/i> at the heart of this phenomenon. While Gen Y-ers<\/i> still recognize the value of physical libraries, such facilities fail to live up to their expectations of speed and convenience. This high comfort level, however, fosters a false sense of ability: young learners often overestimate their skills in finding and – especially \u2013 in evaluating online information. So, one of the first things we must do as teachers is offer guidance in how to use search engines effectively. Fortunately, there are resources such as this infographic<\/a> to help us achieve this.<\/p>\n

Use visuals more effectively<\/strong><\/p>\n

In many cases, technology is enabling us to meet teaching aims in ways we could only imagine in the past. Whereas we used to search through our possessions for meaningful realia to elicit language in class, we can now use online visuals. Infographics like Nik Peachey\u2019s Infographic Tools<\/a> \u00a0(a great starting point) and YouTube video clips shouldn\u2019t be considered as the new alternative to reading<\/i>, though, as they are not an adequate replacement for the development of reading skills. However, they are a great way of stimulating interest and activating schemata.<\/p>\n

Leverage technology to give feedback<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those few lines of red scribbled notes on a learner\u2019s writing homework have never been adequate feedback; this is one aspect of teaching that has been greatly enhanced with tech tools. Gen Y-ers<\/i> have grown up receiving instant feedback on their performance, so they can feel let down if we don\u2019t give them the same level of response to their learning. Using audio recording tool Audacity<\/a> or something like Class Dojo<\/a> allows us to record thousands of words of feedback in the time it used to take to write two or three sentences.<\/p>\n

\"Adam<\/a><\/p>\n

Handle multitasking with care<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recent research suggests that teenagers currently spend more than three hours a day connected to at least two tech gadgets — from a total of more than ten hours spent plugged into<\/i> at least one. I\u2019ve heard such statistics used to justify classroom multitasking, but I\u2019m not convinced it\u2019s a great thing to encourage. The problem is — and Carnegie Mellon University research backs this up — that a young brain working on two tasks has much less overall brain activity than if they were focused on one task.\u00a0 It\u2019s doing less trying to do more. I\u2019d suggest exercising great care dealing with multitasking in class, especially when doing something creative \u2013 which it\u2019s believed suffers the most from multitasking. If learners are looking up words in an online dictionary while doing another task, it\u2019s probably Ok. However, if creativity is your aim, keep multitasking to a minimum.<\/p>\n

I hope you now feel it\u2019s a good thing to be using technology in class and that you don\u2019t have to go over the top. Indeed, you can be successful simply exploiting the ways learners already use technology on a day-to-day basis in their lives.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leveraging Young Learners\u2019 Use of Technology Young learners born between Generation Y and Z have grown up with technology that helps them engage with a constant flow of information and data. Yet the constant question from early 21st century teachers is, \u2018How can we adopt technology in our classes in a meaningful way that facilitates … Continue reading The Young Learners Issue #1 – Adam<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":2221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-young-learners-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}