Teachers Support and Empowerment

Empowering Teachers to Meet the Digital Native Learners

http://www.academia.edu/420105/Empowering_Teachers_to_Meet_the_Digital_Native_Learners

Abstract:

The main idea discussed in the paper is related to the changing world of technology and the striving of teachers to stay in line with the digital natives. The paper depicts that in order to keep the pace up with the young generation, the teachers need to be equally socialized, their thinking should match the students’ thinking and this paper plays its sufficient part in countering those problems faced by the teachers. The paper also depicts a program that was initiated to train teachers the 21^st century teaching methods and how to teach with social media being involved.

Key learning:

The basic nature of the paper is to provide the teachers the ways to understand the digital natives and teach according to the needs of the ongoing high technology scenario. The whole program at Tampere University of Applied Sciences was intended to minimize the mind gaps between the teachers and the digital natives.

Summary:

Introduction:

A great initiative was taken at the Tempere University’s school of vocational teacher education department. The whole process was to enable the teachers to acquire the 21^st century skills to teach and the teachers included vocational as well as higher education teachers. The segment was meant to empower the teachers learn the perspective of digital natives as well as increase their individual teaching growth. The learning included social media learning and also expertise in the social networks.

The results came out to be very fruitful and some of the salient milestones are mentioned below.

Advantages:

·         The teachers made the teams free to choose the tools for the communication regarding social media and this idea gave a boost in the learning morals. The digital natives highly appreciated this step taken by the teachers.

·         The program initiated by the university added a flavor of collaboration and mutual thinking between the students and the teachers.

·         The diversity and tolerance seen between different teams of students and teachers was exceptionally understanding and mutual.

·         The use of the social media was a great source of mutual information between the digital natives. The students who were set to move according to the one way instructions passed by the teachers, were now free to collaborate using twitter and other social media tools.