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Teaching the iGeneration: 5 Easy Ways to Introduce Essential Skills With Web 2.0 Tools
You know what the iGeneration in your classroom looks like. They re the students willing to experiment their way through anything, confident that trial and error can crack the code better than reading manuals or following directions. They re turning to the Internet first and the library second when assigned research projects. Their minds are working fast, but not always as deeply or as accurately as the adults in their lives would like. Yet teachers can capture the attention of the iGeneration and help them grow by integrating technology into classrooms in a way that focuses on the skills that have been important for decades. The purpose of Teaching the iGeneration is to help teachers find the natural overlap between the work that they already believe in and the kinds of digital tools that are defining tomorrow s learning. Each chapter introduces an enduring skill information fluency, persuasion, communication, collaboration, and problem solving as well as a digital solution that can be used to enhance, rather than replace, traditional skill-based instructional practices. These solutions include blogs, wikis, content aggregators, asynchronous discussion forums, web conferencing software, video editing applications, and social bookmarking and annotation tools. In addition, Ferriter and Garry end every chapter of Teaching the iGeneration with a collection of handouts and supporting materials tailored to each skill and tool type. Visit go.solution-tree.com/technology for interactive versions complete with live links to additional resources. Reintroducing rigorous and systematic study to the iGeneration a generation that has grown up connected but has failed to understand the power of connections requires nothing more than a teacher who is willing to show students how the tools that they ve already embraced can make learning efficient, empowering, and intellectually satisfying.
- GenresEducationTechnology
242 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 2, 2016
View my review: https://goo.gl/cg4Ybu
March 10, 2017
Fabulous reading! The authors do an excellent job identifying the best technologies and strategies to use with today's student. Page after page opened my understanding about facts and myths in Teaching the iGeneration. Each chapter provides more insight on best practices with real contextual examples that make it easier to visually connect with how educators can best provide opportunities to engage students in asynchronous and synchronous learning on the web and in a traditional setting. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it to other educators. Anyone interested in completing activities in the book can quickly get started because there are excellent reproducible materials - rubric, surveys, questions, and more at the end of each chapter.
June 30, 2011
This standout quote from the book Teaching the iGeneration: 5 Easy Ways to Introduce Essential Skills With Web 2.0 Tools
“This discovery--that learning depends on skills instead of tools--is one that many educators are struggling to make. Instead of recognizing that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who are intellectually adept--able to identify bias, manage huge volumes of information, persuade, create, and adapt--teachers and district technology leaders wrongly believe that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who know how to blog, use wikis, or create podcasts...”
speaks to the need for educators to focus on helping students master actions like thinking critically, persuading peers, and presenting information in an organized way. In short, learning for students in this plugged-in generation is less about the proliferation of digital tools and more about ensuring students are proficient in age-old thinking, organizing, and writing skills.
The highlighted quote stood out for me because I see teachers feeling overwhelmed and inadequate in the face of the almost daily digital deluge of new tools and this book reminds them that the most important educational concepts are still the same as they ever were. The implications of this idea for teaching and learning are profound. Instead of the teacher feeling inadequate because students want to use unfamiliar digital tools for projects and assignments, the teacher can immediately use or adapt the grading rubrics presented in the book to ensure the content of projects and assignments is rigorous and well formed. The message of this book is that learning has never been about the tools, it is about the content and the quality of the thinking students do in completing the assignments.
This book uses five chapters to help teachers thoughtfully apply digital tools in the areas of evaluating information, writing persuasively, creating powerful visual stories, studying challenging topics, and collaborating to solve complex problems. Although these themes are commonly found in educational standards what is uncommon about the approach in this book is the scaffolding that is provided for teachers.
Each chapter follows the pattern of topic introduction, review and selection of digital tools that can be used to support instruction, implementation strategies, and comprehensive lesson materials. All the handouts are available online in pdf format. The pdf versions of handouts with text boxes can be completed online (with Adobe Reader X).
Although I agree with the authors that the book helps teachers implement web 2.0 tools, information I gathered while attending ISTE2011 suggests that wikis and blogs are already passé. It also occurs to me that many students are far ahead of the content and concept of this book in the ways they communicate and collaborate with peers or make their voices heard in social and commercial contexts. Clearly, the book is not meant to be the definitive and last resource teachers will ever need in the area of web 2.0 integration, rather, teachers should realize that this book represents baby steps toward harnessing the power of digital tools to help students crystallize and verbalize their positions on a number of important topics and urgent problems that affect our global community.
Despite the fact that this book already seems dated, it is a great resource I have already recommended for teachers instructing grades 5 to 12 who are novice technology consumers. The reproducible resources available online and in the book are perfect for busy teachers who want to focus their time on working with students rather than crafting technology-integrated lessons from scratch.
“This discovery--that learning depends on skills instead of tools--is one that many educators are struggling to make. Instead of recognizing that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who are intellectually adept--able to identify bias, manage huge volumes of information, persuade, create, and adapt--teachers and district technology leaders wrongly believe that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who know how to blog, use wikis, or create podcasts...”
speaks to the need for educators to focus on helping students master actions like thinking critically, persuading peers, and presenting information in an organized way. In short, learning for students in this plugged-in generation is less about the proliferation of digital tools and more about ensuring students are proficient in age-old thinking, organizing, and writing skills.
The highlighted quote stood out for me because I see teachers feeling overwhelmed and inadequate in the face of the almost daily digital deluge of new tools and this book reminds them that the most important educational concepts are still the same as they ever were. The implications of this idea for teaching and learning are profound. Instead of the teacher feeling inadequate because students want to use unfamiliar digital tools for projects and assignments, the teacher can immediately use or adapt the grading rubrics presented in the book to ensure the content of projects and assignments is rigorous and well formed. The message of this book is that learning has never been about the tools, it is about the content and the quality of the thinking students do in completing the assignments.
This book uses five chapters to help teachers thoughtfully apply digital tools in the areas of evaluating information, writing persuasively, creating powerful visual stories, studying challenging topics, and collaborating to solve complex problems. Although these themes are commonly found in educational standards what is uncommon about the approach in this book is the scaffolding that is provided for teachers.
Each chapter follows the pattern of topic introduction, review and selection of digital tools that can be used to support instruction, implementation strategies, and comprehensive lesson materials. All the handouts are available online in pdf format. The pdf versions of handouts with text boxes can be completed online (with Adobe Reader X).
Although I agree with the authors that the book helps teachers implement web 2.0 tools, information I gathered while attending ISTE2011 suggests that wikis and blogs are already passé. It also occurs to me that many students are far ahead of the content and concept of this book in the ways they communicate and collaborate with peers or make their voices heard in social and commercial contexts. Clearly, the book is not meant to be the definitive and last resource teachers will ever need in the area of web 2.0 integration, rather, teachers should realize that this book represents baby steps toward harnessing the power of digital tools to help students crystallize and verbalize their positions on a number of important topics and urgent problems that affect our global community.
Despite the fact that this book already seems dated, it is a great resource I have already recommended for teachers instructing grades 5 to 12 who are novice technology consumers. The reproducible resources available online and in the book are perfect for busy teachers who want to focus their time on working with students rather than crafting technology-integrated lessons from scratch.
February 18, 2013
A comprehensive handbook for teachers looking to integrate technology into their teaching. The lesson plans are geared toward middle/high school, but some could be adapted for younger students. Very detailed lesson plans, rubrics and reproducible handouts are included. Several of my favorite tools are included; diigo and voicethread. Unfortunately, as we know too well, technolgy is a quickly moving target. The nice chapter on Google's Wonder Wheel is already out of date, after Google discontinued it.
May 22, 2016
Excellent resources and suggestions for classroom use of digital tools.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews