Millennials And Technology Analysis

With access to technology in the classroom greatly surpassing that of the 20th century, students of today are now accustomed to different modes of enquiry and have therefore developed different modes of learning. As such, the need for teaching methodologies to adapt to both the new technologies and the students at which they are targeted has greatly increased. Furthermore, in an age where advancements in technology have become a quotidian occurrence, there have consequently been many theories about exactly how these developments have been integrated in the education system and with what success. By determining the different modes of learning of the millennial students of today, as well as the outlining the criteria for successful assimilation
To place both technology and methodologies in the correct scope of this research, we must first look at the learner at which these ideologies are aimed. Since there is a strong assimilation of technology into today’s daily life, millennial’s, individuals born between 1982 and 2002, are said to have decreased tolerance to traditional teaching methods and therefore need active learning strategies in order to be successfully reached (Roehl, Reddy and Shannon 2013). On the contrary, Millennials And Technology: Addressing The Communication Gap In Education And Practice (Gibson and Sodeman 2014) suggests that although research findings validate classrooms that foster the use of technology, there is a risk that as a result, millennials may be less likely to able to manage themselves and others effectively later in life. This points to the idea that while technology is inextricably linked to millennial students, it is within the methodologies that we must search to characterize the success of its integration into the
With the flipped classroom scenario, this “allows teachers greater insight into students' grasp of information” (Roehl, Reddy and Shannon 2013) therefore essentially eliminating ambiguity and allowing teachers to view the progress of the student immediately. However Gibson and Sodeman suggest that for educators to get an insight into their students’ progress, they need to first learn to “speak the millennial language.” Millennials And Technology: Addressing The Communication Gap in Education and Practice then goes on to suggest that in order to solve said language barrier, one potential solution could involve a mentorship program between students and educators. But therein lies a problem that effectively brings us back to square one; we know that due to the way in which millennials learn in the 21st century that traditional mentoring practices won’t be effective in connecting with students, thus defeating the purpose of using technologically apt methodologies in the first place. While we can deduce that technology in the classroom can in fact be implemented simply and effectively, testing the success of this seems not to be in the measurement of the student’s ability to attain knowledge, but in the seamless merging of both traditional and contemporary