On technology in the classroom: "Working in the Millennials’ classroom"

It does not come as any big surprise that students and their way of learning have changed over the years. Since learners are not the same, the classroom has also changed. Today’s teachers have to cope with the Millennials' (also known as Generation Y, and related to Digital Natives, dealt with on an older post) way of learning. These learners, who are web savvy, multi-tasking, and highly connected to via social media, are difficult to address when it comes to teaching. Not only we need to come to an understanding of the way they learn but also we need to construct the best classroom for them. When thinking about this classroom, the first thing that comes to mind is the inclusion of technology. A classroom without technology would not be a classroom for the Millennials.

In the search for the best ways of including technology in the classroom we have come across many devices, tools, softwares that have improved the quality of our teaching.  For example, the other day we were learning to use Vokie to create animations that could be very useful when thinking about the classroom pet or for making older students create a vokie to record themselves speaking English and share it through any social network. We also worked with programs that can help us to present words in more entertaining ways as Tagul or Wordle.  Technology is also useful when thinking about teacher’s materials design, which is yet another improvement for the whole teaching and learning process (as I established before on my previous post). How much should be thank the web 2.0 technology, don’t you think?

Another thing to be taken into consideration when thinking about the building of a more "Generation Y" classroom is the inclusion of this generation’s culture into the lessons. For example, the other day we went to a talk about the use of “selfies” as a didactic resource.

Lastly, we can not forget that we also belong to this generation and that, therefore, we also have some special characteristics as Gen Y teachers. Because we are also part of this generation we have the advantage of sharing points of view, which definitely makes the teaching task much easier (though not less complex).