Teaching the iGeneration: Five 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.