Teaching Our Digital Age Students

As educators in the 21st century, we have brand new challenges and successes with out digital age students.  It has become increasingly important to utilize a variety of different teaching strategies to help meet the needs of every student and to teach our new Common Core standards (or maybe our new Arizona College and Career Ready Standards).Common Core flak may spur changes Our new standards call for more constructivist strategies. They require inquiry and learning to be done by the students, no more are the days where we feed information to our students.  But we do need to take the time to teach them how to determine whether the information they find is accurate or not.  This is where some of the other strategies could make more of an appearance. We also have challenges reaching our students.


Our digital age students learn how to use technology younger and younger.  Most students have iPods/iPads or similar devices.  They are proficient with their computer skills since they play many games on them.  While you are shopping at stores you are constantly seeing kids with electronics in their face.  This has made teaching easier yet also more challenging.  Students have gotten used to the behaviorist idea of instant feedback through their electronic usage.  So while this can make it more difficult to engage students without electronics, it makes it so much easier to reach them with their own methods.  Taking a old method that the students dread, journaling, and giving them the opportunity to do it on an iPod or the computer, instantly makes the task fun.