Part Deux: Rebooting Digital Natives

The other week I lamented about the lack of technological "know how" demonstrated by my students when starting to integrate Google Drive into class along with Google Forms on top of Moodle. The frustrations experienced were based upon the assumption that students would have a better background then they did.

Reflecting upon where to go after this initial experience, I went back to the drawing board as the first problem based learning project was introduced this week. By ensuring that I better model and demonstrate the technological tools that are being pushed in class, it is hoped that students will become more comfortable using technology for academic purposes.
Thus this project will have students use Google Ed Apps for writing their annotated bibliographies and writing their argumentative paper, and building a site that will host their pieces of propaganda. In terms of research students will utilize the databases that are subscribed to through our library.
Despite the recalibration of how this was delivered there were still frustrations from my perspective in getting students to effectively use Google Ed Apps and perform formal research instead of simply "googling" it. My oft-repeated mantra is that this is a new experience for most of these students and that we are on a journey towards where they need to be at the end of the year. Having students solve "low hurdle" problems is part of this frustration, where if there isn't an answer/solution immediately then they give up.
After this initial first week, I am looking forward to seeing what they have come our first conferences this week and how this project continues to unfold.

Rebooting Digital Natives

The past few weeks I have been starting to further integrate technology into my classes of freshmen and sophomores in Social Studies as I have navigated what has been at my disposal in my new building. Most interesting to me has been the students' learning curve when it comes to accessing information on the internet, simple Google searches has been the general response provided when asking them about how they conduct research.

This didn't surprise me as much as how foreign these students were to how Google Drive aka Docs worked. As I had each class work on a collaborative document using Drive, the students were "amazed" by how we could type at the same time on the same document! Multiple students asked what they had to do to save this document so that they could work on it at home later/have a copy of it...
As I explained the concept of the cloud, many students were still perplexed about using a collaborative document and how to access the hyperlinks that were provided in the template that was provided to them. I have realized that I need to check for understanding on how to use some forms of technology that I had mistakingly assumed students knew how to use. Thus I will be looking to reboot my digital natives!