Blog Post# 13

A vision of students today

This short video summarizes some of the most important characteristics of students today. It shows the viewer how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, aspiration’s, dreams for the future, what their lives are going to be like, and what changes they will occur in their lifetime. As a teacher or a university president I would think that the message of this video is that we need to prepare our students the best way we can for what life is going to throw at them now and in the future. We as teachers should teach our students how to use the tools of technology properly because that’s what our future in education is going to be. We already use tools such as blogs, PLN’s, Skype, and Twitter. We must also understand that students have busy lives, a perfect example of this was when during the video when the students were holding up the signs that said I spend 3hrs online a day and I spent 2hrs a day on the phone eventually when it was all added up before the day was over the students were spending 26.5hrs a day doing stuff, At the end of this they said now that’s multitasking.

My biggest question is as teachers why should our students have to do all of this multitasking and be this loaded down to learn. I don’t think they should be honestly. Studies have shown that multitasking is bad for your memory. For example, Imagine this: You get off the couch to get a snack from the refrigerator, you're interrupted by a phone call, and arrive in the kitchen with no clue why you're there. But why is this? This common scenario illustrates how even the simplest forms of multitasking can lead to glitches in the moment-to-moment processing of information. This is known as working memory, says Adam Gazzaley, MD, an associate professor of neurology, physiology, and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. So why at teacher would we want to make our students multitask when it is detrimental to one thing as teachers we are trying to expand our students memory, knowledge, and how to utilize that knowledge we are instilling in them. I think we as teachers shouldn’t focus on the quantity of work we are expecting from our students but the quality of the work that they do.