I read an interesting article this morning from hugeinc.com about the online behavior of the newest generation of digital natives, our digital kids. Digital kids are approxiametely 10 years old and have lived all their life with digital tools. The article is geared toward marketing professionals. While the article is somewhat frightening in its key takeaways to better market to children, I believe these key takeaways can be adapted to better teach our children. Here's how:
1. Mobile screen time has increased by 10 minutes per day from 2013.
We can shift learning to the tablet or smartphone. If kids are already looking at their devices, let's make it for an educational purpose.
2. "Kids are sophisticated negotiators who understand family budget constraints."*
Kids understand what they want and they know exactly what to say or do to get it. They also understand the constraints within which they must work to get what they want. Let's use this to our advantage in the classroom. We can give students parameters for a task, and then allow them to decide how best to accomplish the task. We must then hold them accountable for their decisions and ask them to defend their justifications. In other words, we should empower student voice and representation.
3. "Kids are already familiar with e-commerce conventions."
It scares me a little that 10-year old kids know how to buy things online. We should help our students become even savvier digital consumers. Including digital citizenship and media literacy into our lessons will help.
4. "Kids are highly visual surfers, but aesthetics aren't very important to them."
Kids are drawn to images and will often skip text to look at images first. We should also become image-first educators. I don't want to give the impression that text doesn't matter, because it does. It matters greatly, so we should use images as an engagement tool to bring kids into the text. Have students create images to summarize text or videos. Have a visual summary at the end of notes or to break up long pieces of text. Kids are also "functional and task-oriented surfers", so problem-based or inquiry-based lessons that incorporate technology are key. Give students a problem or a question based on the content-standard and allow them to find the answers using the power of technology. Digital kids are also drawn to large pictures, animation, and short videos, so keep maximum engagement by adding these to lessons.
5. "Kids love customizing their experience and building something unique."
I recently read an article on student-driven unit planning. In the framework, the teacher guided students through technology-driven research at the beginning of the unit to determine what should be taught during the unit. Based on student recommendations, the teacher would plan the unit and fill in any gaps that students missed. This collaborative unit-planning became the hook for the rest of the unit. Kids also love to play, so find that playful side and add unexpected fun to your teaching. Socrates once said, "You can found out more about a person in an hour of play than in an entire year of conversation." Let's turn our classrooms into learning playgrounds.
6. "Peers and family are extremely influential tastemakers."
Kids are influenced by their peers and family members, so we should be proactive in marketing our teaching and classroom to those people. We should maintain positive, open communication with families so that families stay positive and open to our classroom. I would love to see more family workshops based on concepts we're teaching or learning videos geared to helping parents understand how to help their students. We could also invite parents in for learning days, so that they can experience the classroom from their child's perspective.
7. "Offline channels are still critical tools in content discovery."
Kids spend on average 2 hours per day in front of a screen. Referencing what kids are viewing outside of school is a way to connect with students inside the classroom. Add in a Phineas and Ferb reference in a math problem and watch your kids crack up while they fully engage with the problem. Kids also love getting real mail with their name on it. One way to leverage this would be to have students contribute to a class magazine or newsletter that gets mailed home to every student. This would obviously cost postage and printing, so it may not work in every school. At the same time, what would the impact be if we found ways to make it work?
8. "E-commerce experiences drive visits to the physical store."
Replace "e-commerce" with e-learning and "physical store" with physical classroom, and you have the model for transforming education with technology. Pretty cool.
*All italicized quotes come from the original hugeinc.com article "What Matters Now: Digital Kids". Find it here: "What Matters Now: Digital Kids".