So what about teachers? Hasn’t a big part of our clientele changed? In fact, hasn’t all of our clientele changed? Have we rolled up our sleeves to re-educate ourselves about how students function in this new online digital world? We don’t want to be looking in on this new digital culture with bewilderment. We don’t want
to be continually wondering why the teaching strategies that used to work with the older generation aren’t working with the digital generation today, while we accuse modern students of being less capable than their parents or blaming them for our inability to connect with this new digital culture and to esteem their clever uses of digital tools to do things we never dreamed possible. So if we hope to teach the digital generation, then we must connect with their culture. We must develop a new mindset that includes new digital tools as central to the way life is lived. And we must acknowledge that even though we gain some understanding into how they use these tools to communicate and get things done, to some extent we will always be outsiders looking in. We must allow them to access information in a way that is native to their new life experience and learn from them because they will use strategies that we just don’t get.
It is critical that we understand that the digital generation has adopted new behaviors that utilize new technology in new and innovative ways that are completely foreign to older people. It is important that those of us who did not grow up with digital tools realize that we can’t expect to just observe these behaviors and then immediately think we can do what they do. That is why we must let our students access information natively. We must let them use the new behaviors they have developed to harness the power of new technological tools to do extraordinary things in ways that we simply don’t understand.
Therefore, teachers must adopt a new mindset for the use of digital tools in school. There are three key aspects to this new mindset. First, we must acknowledge the centrality of digital tools in the lives of our students and in life in general in the 21st-century, both as a means to connect to modern digital culture and to do real work in the online “flat” world. If digital tools are central to 21st-century life, then they must be central to what we ask students to do in school. It’s not enough just to use digital tools as add-ons to our existing 20th-century approach to instruction, which is the way many teachers use digital tools today. Since teachers have been told to use technology, they add a nonessential use of digital tools to an existing project. Worse, students are only allowed to use technology when they get their traditional assignments completed. Then they are allowed to blast aliens or surf the Internet for a few minutes. The digital generation sees through these superfluous and gratuitous uses of technology a mile away and they do more harm than good because they only reinforce students’ feelings that the schoolwork their teachers give them is out of touch with the realities of the modern world. This 20th-century approach only increases the students’ feelings of the irrelevance of school.
It is vital that teachers make the use of digital tools central to projects that students do. We must explore the use of digital tools that can enhance learning. It can start with a tool as simple as a word processor. Word processors are virtually ubiquitous and they are very powerful for teaching the logical thought behind the writing process. When used effectively, a word processor is a fantastic tool that
facilitates multiple drafts of writing, makes it easy for peer editing of rough drafts, provides numerous proofing tools for correcting and refining written work, and empowers students to publish their work in many different formats including print, web sites, and movies. There are many more software programs and online tools that can greatly enhance the teaching of project planning and the brainstorming of ideas, locating research information, and data analysis, as well as tools for presenting the final product of project work in various multimedia formats. When these tools are central to the work students are asked to do in school, students immediately see the relevance to their lives. Furthermore, students doing projects that use digital tools in meaningful ways develop skills that will serve them well in 21st-century life.
Acknowledging the centrality of digital tools to the culture of the younger generation leads naturally to the second aspect of the new mindset teachers must adopt to be successful in teaching the digital generation. We must explore new methods of instruction that use new digital tools as an integral component in teaching traditional and 21st-century skills. This is obvious. If these tools are inextricably linked to modern digital culture, then using them for learning is a given. However, the years teachers have spent growing up and teaching in a nondigital or slightly digital world make it difficult for many educators to see instruction from a digital perspective. Embracing digital tools as central to learning will take real effort. While we are not saying that teachers have to abandon everything they have ever done, they certainly must let go of the idea that just because an instructional approach worked when they went through school, it will work today. In the fast- moving world of the 21st century, we cannot even hold on to the idea that just because an instructional approach worked 10 years ago, it will work today. Current teaching methods must be re-evaluated in light of the rapid emergence of digital culture. Teachers should be asking these kinds of questions for every lesson they prepare: Can digital tools be used to make the learning relevant for students who have grown up immersed in the use of digital tools? Can digital tools enhance the learning so that it is more effective than a nondigital approach?
Teachers must also let go of the idea that teaching the digital generation will be comfortable. It probably won’t be. The world has shifted so significantly in the last 15 years that most students can’t relate to many of the experiences that teachers accept as normal. They are not normal today, and if teachers are going to connect with their new clientele of students immersed in digital culture, then they must let go of much of what they think the life of a young person is like. And that will be disorienting. It will be uncomfortable. In fact, a certain level of discomfort in the teacher is likely a good indication that they are on the right track with what they are doing with their students. Now, of course, everything that is digital is not better than traditional teaching methods, but even if it is comparable, then the gains in terms of relevance to digital culture make it worth embracing.
So how can digital tools be used to enhance our instruction? Just what kinds of things can we do with the digital generation? It is beyond the scope of this book to provide an exhaustive coverage of all the possible uses of digital tools for learning. Our goal here is to help teachers develop a new mindset that is open to the potential these tools have for creating relevance and enhancing instruction. However, it may be useful to look at a few examples of how digital tools can assist with learning to help teachers see how adopting this new mindset can help them greatly with instructing the digital generation.
Let’s consider the use of a digital tool that is now virtually ubiquitous in the modern world—the word processor. This tool is a boon to anyone with some writing to do. It is so powerful for drafting, editing, proofing, and publishing written work that it is now the standard tool throughout the publishing industry. No one wanting a job in publishing today could even get in the door, let alone survive a single day on the job, without word processing skills. Yet the word processor is still not a standard tool in English classes in the K–12 school system where students are taught to write. The reason is not that the tool is not applicable to writing—the soft copy editing features of the word processor and its graphical components for creating layouts support every step of the writing process from planning to drafting to revising to proofing to publishing. The reason is also not that schools don’t have enough computers to put word processors in English classrooms. Schools and school districts across North America have reassigned, recycled, or just plain thrown out many computers over the last 20 years that have all had word processing capabilities and could have been used in writing classrooms. These machines may not have been the latest generation of computer, but they were very capable of enhancing the teaching of the writing process. The major reason they have not been used for teaching writing is that the use of the word processor for teaching writing is not in the mindset of English teachers. And by not using this digital tool, English teachers have missed a great opportunity to enhance the teaching of the writing process, to equip students with 21st-century writing skills that will serve them well in the future, and to connect with the digital culture of their students.
Another digital tool that is making its way into more and more classrooms is the web browser that allows teachers and students to explore the World Wide Web on the Internet. However, again the mindset of the teachers is, in many cases, limiting the effectiveness of the use of this tool in the classroom. Now certainly the use of the browser is a step in the right direction toward connecting with the digital generation, but the way it is used is frustrating the younger generation. Teachers want to access the Internet to get words. They are often locked into a 20th-century mindset of what research and learning information look like. They have students search for articles and text-based information that can be used in the production of traditional reports and essays. Many teachers think that they have joined the 21st century because they get their students to include photos, illustrations, and graphs in
their project work. We are not saying that there is no place for this kind of project, but we are saying that the mindset behind a focus on these kinds of projects is greatly limiting the power that the Internet has to create 21st-century communications, and this mindset is greatly frustrating the digital generation. Anyone who has had students use computers connected to the Internet should stop for a moment and think where the students want to go to get information about the world or to learn some new skill. They immediately head off to YouTube to watch videos of world events, or see what their favorite sports or entertainment figure is doing, or to listen to their favorite music, or to see how to play the guitar, or how to fix their mountain bike, and so on. For the digital generation, information is multimedia. And for the rest of the world outside school, that is the way information is going as well. If our mandate is to prepare students for the world they are going to graduate into, shouldn’t students be taught the skills needed to retrieve, process, and publish this kind of multimedia information in school? And wouldn’t using this kind of information help greatly in connecting with them? After all, digital multimedia is a big part of the native language of the digital generation.