Week 4 Reflection

The Chapter in the book, Is it Age or IT: First Steps Towards Understanding the Net Generation, focuses on the changes that need to happen in higher education in order to adapt to the Net Generation. The Net generation is described as people born from the year 1982 to 1991. A generation who is about to see their last class graduate from college this Spring, Class of 2013 and will be used to try to implement more changes in the classroom. 

    From this article we learn the Net Generation are digital natives or people who grew up using the internet. They use multiple gadgets at one time and enjoy multi-tasking. According to the article they differ from previous generations because they dislike a slow pace. The Net Generation is used to “googling” question and dislikes waiting for answers. They enjoy social interaction as much as the latest technology and they enjoy a real classroom more than an online class. So what information can we take from this and apply it to students in grade school, since that would be a very different generation we must study.

    The information we can adapt to grades K-12 from this past generation are the way they absorb information. One thing that was important to the Net Generation was graphics and pictures, long picture less literature lost the attention of the learner. They disliked reading long instructions and at times would rather assume the rest of the directions than to continue reading. We need to implement instructional illustrations, graphics and videos into the lesson plans. They need to be fast paced enough for them to understand the concept but short enough to keep their attention. They also need to be able to communicate their questions to their teacher outside the classroom such as email, a discussion board or maybe even an IM conference time. After all these future generations did learn differently, Cookie Monster and Elmo were there first teachers making learning colorful and full of images.