Group items tagged

iGeners are almost universally plugged in. Ear buds hang from backpacks, and cell phones are stuffed into every pocket. Instant communication has replaced listening to messages, streaming video has replaced waiting for television shows to start, Xboxes have replaced Ataris, digital images have replaced negatives, and high-speed connections have replaced dial-up modems.

iGeners aren’t always the best students, however! Working quickly instead of carefully, they infosnack their way through class, flitting from instant experience to instant experience. Reading deeply, considering multiple perspectives and interacting with others in meaningful ways is pushed aside in a race for immediate gratification.

Whether students work in cloud-based platforms or take pictures of analog notes, technology lets them save their work indefinitely. I once had a wonderful advisee. Every afternoon, we repeated this routine. Find his planner. Find his notebooks. Make sure that he could find his notes in said notebooks. Put the notebooks into his backpack. When we finally got this child a laptop, everything changed. He typed all of his notes in Google Docs so that he could access them from any device and from anywhere. Suddenly, everything was truly saved.

note taking is an activity where the note taker needs to process information and reframe, reorganize, and work with the data to make note taking useful.