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Collaborative learning promotes higher-order thinking

This image captures exactly what Prensky talked about in his article, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” Those that are digital immigrants are assimilating to new literacies. They weren’t born during or after the digital age, but rather before, in which they are focused on more traditional methods of researching. As opposed to the new generation, digital immigrants were more accustommed to going to the library and reading encylopedias. However, students from my generation are digital natives who are concerned with always being connected and multitasking. We’re much more social and multimedia oriented, which may be the reason for some students lack of concentration in the class.

I thought this cartoon captured the very argument we talked about in class. Those that have a negative view of technology and its implementation of it in the class might be opposed to using it because they feel it’s more of a distraction than beneficial. However, I like this illustration because it shows that even without it students could very well remain unfocused and uninterested. They’ll have thoughts of outside activities after class, daydream, or just not listen. As it is, students that weren’t from this generation weren’t always attentive, yet they couldn’t blame technology for their distractions. It goes to show that we need to engage our students like Prensky argues and incorporating technology (something they can manipulate and catch their attention) might be the answer.

The ability to store documents, projects, and other files has also gone through its own evolution. In this day and age, we now have apps that provide us with the capability to store everything in one account. We no longer have to carry anything around, but rather we can store it all in one place, the cloud or google drive. In Ed131, we talked about various apps that also help with storing notes, like Evernote or Google Docs.

“the digital immigrant” vs. “the digital native”

(Marc Prensky)

With the evolution of technology, we must start to create an evolution in education. After all, we’ve discussed that what we learn is consistently being updated, so we need to progress and start taking a new approach to learning and teaching. This “evolved thinking” could be put towards what James Paul Gee calls “game-like learning.” If we implement his arguments into the curriculum and center learning around the child, they could gain much more facts. Instead of memorizing or doing rote assignments, students could be challenged to apply concepts learned in class to situations. The situated learning could have students experience something positive and motivate them to apply their knowledge to realistic situations. No more worksheets and working out problems, but rather solving problems through trial and error with out-of-the box thinking. As it is, I’ve learned we want students to build higher-order thinking.

Educational Technology

I took Ed131: Educational Technology to fulfill a media requirement for my education major. When I was looking at the options that would fulfill the category, Educational Technology caught my attention. I initially was intrigued with the title. I thought I would gain some insight into the changes of education and technology, and how there is a need to teach both codependently. Each has enough to benefit the other. I thought taking the course would benefit me in the long run, in that, I would learn about the impact each has on the other. Since I was planning on taking Ed30: 21st Century Literacies, I thought taking both classes together would help in strengthening my views on what education is and the visualize the evolution of society’s expectations of a student in this modern digital age. My expectations of this class were high, but since taking it it hasn’t fallen short of that. This class has only reinforced my beliefs about what students are capable of and how powerful it is to let them know that they can achieve much higher than they think they can.

#techined #digitalage #21stcenturyliterate #literate

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