When we ask teenagers what they do when we see them sitting in front of the computer, many times their answer is "I'm studying." We all know that at the moment, few teachers use the Internet to teach, however, studying with the Internet is something we should get used to, because there are many advantages that this medium can offer in terms of education.
A tool for learning with pictures
We all have cookbooks at home, and if I ask them which cookbooks are the best, they'll almost certainly say in unison: the ones with photos.
Throughout their years of formal learning, children and adolescents must acquire thousands of new concepts, and within these, many will present difficulties to be assimilated because they are generally presented out of context. In these cases, using an image from the internet can be very useful.
Learning with images stimulates the right brain area, making students pay more attention to concepts, activating their internal representation more easily and fixing them more strongly in long-term memory. Therefore, when children or students do not understand a concept, it would be very useful to invite them to look for images that help them integrate them more easily.
A place to learn your way
In the 20th century, most students had their learning limited by what they studied in educational centers. But in the 21st century, the internet is where they really learn.
Something increasingly common is that a student tells his teacher the history and customs of a town in much more detail than a textbook because he has learned it by playing his favorite video game or because it is related to his favorite movie.
But there are more and more situations in which these students, after becoming interested in something that the teacher commented in class, searched the internet and spent an hour watching a documentary, or several, on the subject in question. I'm not saying that they study more than before, but that for the first time in a long time, they are looking for information on a topic that interests them without anyone marking it as homework.
Young people today are looking for tutorials to learn how to make videos, reading articles on video game tricks, or regularly visiting blogs about ecology on their own initiative, and that is something that teachers should exploit. They disagree?
An interactive form of communication
Something that many teachers are beginning to incorporate into their teaching strategies is the use of a blog to communicate with students. These types of initiatives are very positive because they make the student, a digital native, establish a greater bond with their immigrant teacher who is making the effort to “speak their language”.
There is still a long way to go for most teaching blogs to match many internet pages that capture the attention of students and keep them nailed to the chair as if by magic, but what is being achieved is that student feel more motivated, more committed to your learning, ask questions and exchange ideas with your teacher and peers.
For this reason, more and more teachers are encouraged to use new technologies, incorporating platforms such as Moodle or educational blogs to their classes.
The Internet is growing at a tremendous rate and is changing our way of living, relating to teaching and learning. For this reason, it is very interesting to study the way in which students use these resources to build new learning and, at the same time, learn about how they are able to build new knowledge in a deeper and faster way.
