How Should Schools Address the Learning Needs of Digital-Age Students - Essay Example

How should schools address the learning needs of digital-age It has never been a secret that people who live in the post-modern society differ drastically from their predecessors. These differences have to do with all spheres of human activity ranging from personal preferences and tastes to global issues such as ideology. As the world changes, people also have to adapt to new ways of life and its pace, they need to develop certain skills, characteristics and competences in order to adjust to modern world’s new requirements. Today we can face a flowering of a new era which is commonly called a digital age. Its name is attributable to the rapid development of technology and to the overall pervasiveness of digital devices in people’s everyday life. Children who happen to mature in this new digital age are already accustomed to all sorts of influence made by various tablets, smartphones and media. They do not need to adapt, they are already bearers of absolutely new qualities, concepts and ways of thinking. But when these children embark on education, they face numerous difficulties. It turns out that traditional educational programs do not meet the requirements of digital age students. As a result, an important issue of reorganizing educational curriculum arises, and our task is to figure out how exactly traditional school program should change to address the learning needs of digital-age students. To begin with, it is essential to understand how exactly digital-age students differ from students in the past. In other words, what qualities make them so special and unique, so that traditional educational strategies no longer satisfy their needs? This issue was addressed by Marc Prensky. In his article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” Prensky gives an outline of changes that modern students have undergone, and explains the differences between them and students from the past. He gives two designations to describe modern students and representatives of former generations. “Digital Natives” are children who grow up fully under the influence of new technologies. “Digital Immigrants”, in turn, are people who were born before the digital age and now try to adopt the aspects of new technology. Prensky claims that not only thinking patterns, but also modern students’ brains have changed. The main engine of these changes is the overwhelming “digital input” that children receive while growing up. As a consequence, “Digital Natives” think faster, they receive new information easier, combine activities and often turn to multi-tasking. They percept visual information better than texts and prefer instant feedback and rewards for their work. “Digital Natives” spend countless hours on various video games, instant messaging, Internet surfing and other screen activities. As a result their brains are retrained and children develop new, parallel ways of thinking. This makes digital-age student different. Unlike them, students from the past were used to logically built representation of material, step-by-step learning and lower pace of studying, they had sequential minds. Nowadays modern students sometimes face real challenges while attending school with linear educational systems. Because of the discrepancy between traditional school teaching strategies and students’ interests, abilities and pace of learning, children often get distracted. They believe that this type of education is not worthy paying attention to. Learners expect the same level of interaction and socialization with teachers, as they get in their personal life, but teachers simply “read from their textbooks” (Prensky, 3). Moreover, children who constantly play computer games can develop certain set of skills, inaccessible to their predecessors. Those are representational competence, multidimensional visual-spatial skills, mental maps, inductive discovery, attentional deployment and others. All this leads us to a necessity of reorganization of existing educational methodologies and content. Modern world is characterized by ever growing competition almost in all spheres. The development of technology gives us a full permanent access to all kinds of information worldwide. That is certainly a great benefit for modern society. However, it is getting harder and harder to sift out really valuable data from everything available in the Internet or on TV. So, in order to thrive in the 21st century as citizens and workers, digital-age students have to acquire critical thinking skills. It is crucial to be able to analyze the situation, use inductive and deductive reasoning and make proper judgments having evaluated given information. Furthermore, today’s students have to be creative and innovative in order to be successful in modern world of constant competition. Divergent thinking, exploring new theories and inventing new solutions will maximize students’ potential. It is important for them, as for the representatives of the 21st century, to regard each failure as a lesson and to demonstrate perseverance and determination. Alongside with critical and divergent thinking we should name communication and collaboration as key competences of modern students. It is essential for children to be able to transmit their thoughts, listen to others and cooperate with them. These skills can be developed through team-working where students have to show flexibility and the ability to adapt in order to reach a common aim. We have decided that it is necessary to change the curriculum so that new way of learning would satisfy all needs of digital-age student. But to do that we have to define what learning is altogether. There is a widespread delusion that learning has to do only with school, college or education in general. Such a statement is, in many ways, false. Learning is a lifelong process which begins from our birth and lasts till our death. During different stages of life people learn: as babies we learn how to eat, to speak, to walk, as children we learn how to socialize, as adults we learn how to cope with different life challenges and so on. Learning is a process of getting new skills, information and even habits from our own experience. Of course, education is also an integral part of learning, but it starts much earlier than in elementary school or in kindergarten. In this perspective of lifelong learning it is important to trace the influence of digital devices on children and analyze, whether schools are doing a good job of preparing students. Firstly let us think about the impact of technologies on the youngest children. Nowadays they are exposed to the influence of different devices more than ever. Little babies operate their parents’ laptops and tablets without difficulties and feel quite comfortable doing that, having no confusion at all. Parents, is turn, stimulate their children by giving them “educational” and “developing” games to play. However, Nancy Carlsson-Paige in one of her articles claims that any kind of screed game cannot substitute real play. Little children need to play to develop their imagination and creativity. Without first-hand engagement, if children do not touch the objects, but only tap the screen, they cannot develop their senses. Moreover, the absence of real play may lead to problems with emotional and social competences. If parents continue distracting children with the help of screens, rather than teaching them to cope with their feelings, they will not have any personal interactions and experiences. All in all Nancy Carlsson-Paige recommends keeping young children under the age of two away from all digital devices. She believes that using smartphones and tablets is an intrusion into the natural way of children’s development. They should learn from their physical experience and with the help of first-hand playing which would give them an idea of our 3-dimentional world. Such are the recommendations for pre-school education. Speaking about further stages, the school years, it is already impossible to ignore the peculiarities of digital-age children and traditional teaching methods become insufficient. Nowadays new standards are introduced in order to meet the demands of learners. These standards propose new concepts and approaches instead of old ones. For instance, new Common Core math standard denies rote learning strategies and offers new ways of presenting learning material. Jill Tucker proves that by showing how new math standards are applied. She writes about a lesson in one of California schools where children learned fractions in a new way. Instead of solving tons of equations children were dividing hexagons with the help of other geometric figures and writing equations out of their drawings. Students were interested in the lesson, got the material faster and understood it better. This experience shows that students often understand concepts intuitively, from the example they have, rather than from a set of rules and algorithms to follow. Such approaches fit better to digital-age students and enable them to think creatively and to demonstrate their own thinking. Unfortunately, such programs are not applied nationwide and many schools still use traditional variants. Concerning higher education, the issue of digital age is referred to mostly in the context of online learning. The development of technologies has made it possible to create online platforms for post-secondary education. Unsurprisingly, this idea has both allies and opponents. Last year the debates were held where pros and cons of online learning were discussed. On the one hand, these courses can give an opportunity for students to study at their own individual pace, get instant feedback and frequent rewards – all these are the requirements of digital-age students. So, online courses can become a revolutionary innovation into traditional education system. But on the other hand, with online courses students do not get personal touch with tutors and other students. One of the debaters against, Jonathan Cole, said that “people learn from each other” when they are together. So, face-to-face communication plays an important role in education, even if students do not notice that. Moreover, communication in class may help some students overcome certain difficulties. Rebecca Schuman, another debater against, told how learning in class was beneficial for some of her students. One of them was an extremely shy boy who could not communicate with others normally, but in some time the class helped him to learn to talk to people. Another girl was very bright and smart in class, but her written works were quite poor. So communicating with her teacher in class was beneficial for her, because if she had taken an online course, she would have been mistaken for someone not so smart. To sum up, post-secondary education is quite ambiguous. From one point of view, there are some courses available that address the needs of digital-age students, but at the same time they are not flawless and have some drawbacks. Current state of affairs, old-fashioned education strategies and changing needs of today’s students as representatives of a digital age, make the reorganization of school curriculum necessary. Schools will have to change if educators want to increase the level of students’ involvement into the learning process. As Marc Prensky has stated, it is crucial to reconsider methodology and content of education. In terms of methodology, teachers have to go faster, go in parallel, giving more random access. If speaking about content, it should be subdivided into “legacy” and “future” content with the supremacy of the latter (Prensky, 4). The former includes all the activities, specific to traditional strategies, such as computation, reading, writing, logical thinking. “Future” content includes not only digital disciplines, such as robotics and genomics, but also art disciplines: sociology, politics, and ethics. While thinking about introducing new ways of teaching to address digital-age students’ needs, it is worthy to take the needs of teachers into account. As the overwhelming majority of tutors are “Digital Immigrants” (Prensky), they will also need special training, when new educational programs are introduced. To be able to teach modern students, a teacher himself/herself should adapt to new requirements, so that his/her work would have positive results. Digital-age students need digital-age teachers, who will foster their critical thinking skills, promote their creativity and engage them in learning process. I believe, a sort of new standard for teachers should be developed. A 21st century teacher should be able to use all the available digital tools to improve students’ engagement, inspire learner’s creativity, be an effective part of learning teams, cooperate and interact with students. Digital-age teachers should be prepared to teach online and provide simulations. And the last but not least, 21st century teachers should be receptive to global changes and methodological innovations. They should not stick to one sole tradition and reject all further developments and improvements. To conclude, schools definitely have to be reorganized to address the needs of digital-age students. This should be done systematically, on both levels, including methodology and content. Unless these steps are taken, the United States will continue facing the decline of education. So in order for new generation to be successful in future, the decisive actions have to be taken today. Works Cited Agarwal, Anant, Ben Nelson, Jonathan Cole, and Rebecca Schuman. “More clicks, fewer bricks: The lecture hall is obsolete.” Intelligence Squared U.S. 2 April 2014. PDF file. Carlsson-Paige, Nancy. “Is technology sapping children’s creativity?” Nancy Carlsson-Paige Ed.D, n.d. Web. 26 Jun. 2015. Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” On the Horizon Oct. 2001. PDF file. ---. “DigitalNatives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently?” On the Horizon Dec. 2001. PDF file. Tucker, Jill. “New Common Core math standards add up to big changes.” SFGate, 6 Sep. 2014. Web. 26 Jun. 2015. Read More