The Changing Face of the Student

By Judith M. Brooks

"What are you doing Maria?" asked her mother.

"I'm installing Quicktime," said Maria. By the way, Maria is in second grade, and is not unlike other kids her age. Maria and her friends ride bikes, play at the park, color and paint, read books, and yes, spend a lot of time playing on and learning with a computer. Kids her age have literally grown up using a computer. Maria had her first computer keyboard when she was only four months old.

They are not afraid of them and do not view them as an obstacle.

When you ask yourself, how important is integrating technology into my teaching process, perhaps you should you should also ask the question, "Do I still want to be teaching in five to ten years?"

Maria's friend Remy was home sick from school. Worried about him missing his lessons, his mother said, "We are going to spend some time with your math flash cards today." Remy moaned and groaned and said, "I'm going to play MathBlaster instead. I don't need those flash cards. I can learn this by myself." He started the game playing with addition and subtraction problems, but became bored in about an hour and decided to go on to the next hardest level, multiplication.

Granted, the computer does not replace the need to stay within the learning structure of the classroom and curriculum, but it can teach us how to "learn how to learn". And this is a profound way in which technology is changing the learning process.

"Cognitive research has confirmed a commonsensical conclusion: students learn best when they are engaged with what they are studying, when they are making decisions, when they are thinking critically." -- The Nintendo Generation.

By the time these kids get into the classroom of higher education, the traditional lecture in the traditional lecture hall will no longer be tolerated as method of teaching.

Still we must know where we need to be now in order to grow into the type of teaching institution of higher learning that will properly foster the learning needs of our students five years from now.

"The speed of the information revolution can be daunting for educators who want to take advantage of new technologies.

But educators do not need to focus exclusively on leading-edge devices." There are technologies that "offer many of the elements of successful learning: rich interaction, individual experience and rewards for the completion of a task."

The role for the teacher isn't to become consumed with trying to figure how many technologies there are available or what the latest technology is, or trying to keep ahead of the technology. It is much simpler than that and much more in keeping with what a teacher does best.

It is creating a rich format in which to teach students about something, and figuring out which teaching device can be best utilized to do the job. Within the realm of technology that can include anything from putting part of the lesson online to multimedia presentations to programs which simulate the subject matter.

In creating effective teaching formats, knowing who the students are, and how students learn is vital. The student profile is changing largely due to technology. The World Wide Web has provided connectivity and has closed the gaps of distance and time. Thus, the student is anyone who can log on.

"Today’s undergraduate student body is no longer dominated by 18- to 22-year-old high school graduates from affluent backgrounds. It is composed also of increasing numbers of adults from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, already in the workplace, perhaps with families, seeking the education and skills necessary for their careers." -- James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, University of Michigan/Ann Arbor.

The focus of the educational process can no longer be about how well the professor teaches, but about how able the student is to learn. How well teachers foster in their students the ability to problem-solve and learn how to learn will become a measurement of how well the teacher is doing the job.

You may say, "I have been doing this for the last 10 years and it has been extremely affective." You may ask, "How can technology change an already effective means of teaching." But the answer lies not in how technology replaces current instructional methods, but in how the world that these students will enter affects the need for an education process that affords them viability.

January 1999