Students - "Who are they? What do they need? What do they need to know? What are their goals, hopes or dreams? What are they interested in nowadays? What will their lives be like? Or what kind of changes will they go through in their life time?"
I save the most important question for last: “Do we really need to care about the answers?” If we are teachers, the answer will absolutely be a big “YES”.
This is a video created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. The video, called “A Vision of Students Today” summarizes some of the important characteristics of the today’s students.
Having watched the video, please share your reflections and comments about the characteristics of today’s students with the group. In your comment, please reflect on any or some of the following questions:
- If your classroom walls could talk, what would they say? Do you feel in the same way? What is it like to be a student in Turkey? What are your hopes, goals or fears? To what extent do you think they affect your performance as a student?
- As a student teacher, to what extent do you think these facts would change your teaching? (your view of teaching and learning, your method, your understanding of tasks, assessments or etc.)
- Just imagine that 30 years later in 2038, you will be still teaching English either to young learners or teenagers whom have years to be born. How do you think you will keep up with the changing conditions especially as far as the characteristics of the students are concerned?
These are the questions that came to my mind. Please do not hesitate to add any more dimensions or thought-provoking questions to our discussion either leaving a comment here or posting on your own blog.
Keep sharing :))
11 comments:
Thank you very much for the video. I really liked it. Especially the hours part. We need more than 24 hours in a day for being a student. And we have to take this into account when we become a teacher.
Yes, the video offered much food for thought.
What other insights from the video will you take into account when you try to get your students involved in learning?
Dennis in Phoenix
(an online colleague of Sibel's)
A very good video. I think being a student is becoming harder and harder these days as everything else. Being a teacher to deal with these students, as well:) As I student, I am also experiencing these such as finding some of the teachings irrelevant to my life. As a teacher, what I concluded from the video is that we should we should modify our classrooms, teaching styles and materials according to the characteristics of today's students. The most important one is that we should, actually must, incorporate technology to our lessons.
I will keep sharing:)
Thank you for sharing the video.
Dear 12 participants and Sibel,
Excellent video!!! We definitely have to take these variables into account.
I guess being a teacher while being a student is one of the best scenarios to fully experience what a learning-teaching situation should be. It is a humbling experience when we can place ourselves in somebody else´s shoes.
Keep up the great work,
Berta
first of all thanks for sharing such a good video. i think it is a combination of typical problems in teaching. but after i watched the video i thought these are the problems that we have created. i dont mean that technology is not useful, or assignments have no meaning at all but they are to be revised all the time. as teachers one assignment we asked from the class may not be suitable next year, next month or even the next day. moreover if it includes technology we should think twice. if a teacher behaves like this is the web site go and learn and come next week, it is not surprising that the student will not read and learn.
I really liked the video. I think unfortunately it is also true for some of our classes ad the teachers. There were some moments that I really could not bear and wanted to cry out as I got very bored and I did not see any connection between what I was imposed to and my reality. As a student teacher I try hard to improve my teaching skills. For this I all the time search for new things. I try my creativity to conduct the lessons as much enjoyable as possible.
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for your participation in our discussion.
we can take lots of points out of this well- prepared video. You can believe that such scenes do really occur. As a student teacher I believe that to encourage our students to participate the very first step is to learn every one of our students' names. I know from my own experiences that it has great effects on the students. Now I am asking to you if you like, are you still teaching? and How many students' names (from your current class) do you now remember?:)
the video really made me think,
what ı am doing as a student. ı experience the same thigs as a student, and ı believe that in 20 years from now, it will be much more diffcult to make our lessons relevant to real life. it is already hard now:) as the technology keeps improving and developing, real life becomes much more different from what we teach in lessons. thus a teacher should find the way to make his/her lessons a friend of technology. what is necessary for this is creativity!!!
First of all I would like to state that I really liked the video. And It talks about most of the problems that students have today. and I find the “irrelevancy to the real life” issue the most important. İn order to motivate the student to learn, we should make our classroom atmasphere reflect the real world.
in order to make our students get rid of such ideas from their minds, as teachers of English, we should make our teaching relavant to their real life first. how? absolutely it is not the grammar rules or formulas we should teach.
instead we should provide the students with real life situations and problems and we should make them use the language in context and for communication, of course.
and while doing this, we will make use of the technology and additionally can make them use the technology. but again it should reflect the real life. Students, for example for language learning, can use internet for communication with people around the world.
and as teachers, in addition to using technology as an instructional aid and for instructional aims we should benefit from it for our personal and professional development, I think.
Thank you for sharing this video with us. I want to begin with teachers who do not know the names of their students. It may be because of the teacher's characteristic. Some people are not good at learning names. However, if there are few students in a class, teachers should do their best and find ways to learn the names of their students. When the teacher call students with their names during class activities, the students feel confident because they feel they have an identity.
Moreover, students in Turkiye are often exposed to irrelevant and unnecessary information. It is impossible for them to learn each and every item, so they have difficulty in choosing which information to be learned is important and which is not.
Dear Sibel and teacher trainees,
First of all, I'd like to thank Sibel for creating this blog and making you collaborate and learn from each other.When I was a teacher trainee ,I didn't have any single idea about blogging or web 2.0, but now you guys have the chance to interact and learn from each other thanks to web2.0.Even this shows that there's a change.Therefore,we , as teachers need to be aware of these changes and be open to individual differences.As it's also stated in the video ,the changes are usually about technology.We're digital immigrants but we should keep in mind that our students are digital natives so we should integrate technology to our classes as much as we can in order to make them learn both in and outside the class.
Happy blogging
Beyza YILMAZ
instructor of English
-Your instructor's online colleague
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