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This year’s entering college class of 2016 was born into cyberspace and they have therefore measured their output in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds. They have come to political consciousness during a time of increasing doubts about America’s future, and are entering college bombarded by questions about jobs and the value of a college degree. They have never needed an actual airline “ticket,” a set of bound encyclopedias, or Romper Room. Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1994, are probably the most tribal generation in history and they despise being separated from contact with friends. They prefer to watch television everywhere except on a television, have seen a woman lead the U.S. State Department for most of their lives, and can carry school books--those that are not on their e-Readers--in backpacks that roll. 

They have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of “electronic narcotics.”

Having grown up with MP3s and iPods, they never listen to music on the car radio and really have no use for radio at all.

With the rise of standards-based instruction, districts and schools have been seeking out the best tools to foster it. Standards-Based grade books have been created is response to this need. As with educational changes, there are exciting potentials and pitfalls. First of all, here is what works when using the standards-based grade book:

1)     Ensures targeted Assessment and Rubrics

2)     Continuity across Classes and Teacher

Step 1 – Show: You start a SlideTalk video by uploading the slides or images that makes your presentation. Any type of image is valid: powerpoint slides, pictures, screenshots, scanned images… Step 2 – Describe: You type a text description for each slide. This is the text that will be rendered to audio by text-to-speech. You can at any moment listen to the way the audio will sound in the final video, allowing you to fine tune the text to get your message through. You can also choose among a wide selection of high quality voices (by Acapela Group) including more than 70 voices in more than 20 languages. Step 3 – Share: When the video is produced, it is immediately published on YouTube, ready to be shared with your audience. Depending on your subscription level you will also be able to download or control the access to the video as it suits you.

Very low level of development of learning assets specifically for mobile devices.

Just-in-time knowledge: Short bursts of information and learning assets that can be consumed anywhere in just a few minutes.

Moderate to high levels of technology frustration in making learning assets fully viewable and optimized on devices — Flash on an iPad, for example.

the transition to mobile learning is not an easy one for most companies to make.

Prior instructional design was developed for the PC, not iOS or Android devices, so animations and interactions that work well on a desktop computer do not carry the same functionality on a mobile platform. Additionally, learning management systems exist behind layers of security firewalls that make it difficult for users to access courses on their mobile devices.

“It’s almost like they want to find the content by themselves,”

Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase “free-range learning” to describe students’ behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities.

They “don’t want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that,” she says. “It’s more the informal networks that they’re using.”

I started off by selecting a few myself (e.g., technology and privacy, technology and civic discourse, immigration), and showing students the kinds of resources they might be able to find. Then, for the latter part of the course, they chose the issues, found sources, and shared them in the class Zotero library. Working in teams or as individuals (depending on which section they were in), they were then responsible for running a class session and assigning readings for that session.