What a revealing week

Thinking about everything that I read and the movie I saw this week, it’s inevitable that we, teachers, have to adapt our methodologies to reach and feed the Net-genders. What both Marc Prensky (in his presentations to educators, The 21st –century Digital Learner) and Gregory R. Roberts of University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown (with his a series of interviews, polls, focus groups, and casual conversations with other students) found out was that our students want us to teach our content by challenging them, like said Ben McNeely “They get bored if not challenged properly, but when challenged, they excel in creative and innovative ways. They learn by doing, not by reading the instruction manual or listening to lectures”, by setting a goal (like said Diana and James Oblinger ,“They want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda.", by making them interact with projects, the Oblingers assert “In a study that altered instructions from a text-based step-by-step approach to one that used a graphic layout, refusals to do the assignment dropped and post-test scores increased. The Net Gen's experiential nature means they like doing things, not just thinking or talking about things”… and the list of examples goes on and on.

But, I know, as a teacher, that to apply these student’s demands is time-consuming and hard. I know that it requires a great effort of creativity and a digital literacy to successfully achieve it, and most of the time, teachers, as the digital immigrants and Generation X that most of us are, don’t know how to begin (remember that we had always been told what to do and how to study), so for most of us, not-net generation teachers, it is really hard to figure it out by ourselves. The students now I really think we should hear how the students want to be taught, as Prensky and Roberts said (not WHAT to be taught, this for me continues to be role of the experienced teachers, to make myself clear), but I also think that the educational system in general should help us, guide us on how to apply them and supply us with new technology, (not just Power Point, as said a girl in Florida "A lot of teachers make a PowerPoint and they think they're so awesome, but it's just like writing on the blackboard.") in order to allow us to, interacting with their new reality, feed the students with the knowledge that they continue to admire on us, like said Samuel Bass, Junior, Southwest Missouri State University, “I love when I come back from a class where my professor’s knowledge of a particular field is astonishing.”

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