Multi-tasking...is it productive or even possible?

With all of these resources we now have available as educators today are some of us trying to implement too much? We claim that our students are a born generation of multi-taskers and they can handle all the things we throw at them, but is this true?

I believe we are giving our students the opportunity to produce mediocre work because we expect them to work on so many things at once. Instead of getting them to focus on producing a quality product that goes above and beyond the basic requirements, we are just asking them to produce as many as possible of the bare minimum. Is this the correct approach to teaching our students "21st Century Skills"?

Tags: 2.0, 21st, century, multitask, multitasking, quality, web

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Permalink Reply by Emma Ahmed on September 23, 2011 at 4:32am

I am interested in this too. We are constantly exposed to the latest, 'essential' web 2.0 tool for the classroom. How do you know when you should use something? I think it is hard to be selective with students about which new tools to introduce them to without, as you say, overwhelming them. I think you need to create a balance between a variety of tasks that need to be completed with a number of methods whilst maintaining quality, completed products. I will try to do this by sharing examples of the quality of work I expect them to produce and by allowing them to choose which web 2.0 tools they use in their work.