The App Generation

The App Generation was interesting for me to read because I am on the fringe of the app generation. Myspace and AIM were middle school, Facebook was high school, Instagram, Tumblr and Snapchat were the bridge from high school to college. There are aspects of the book I don’t relate to at all, but a lot of what it says are things I see in my friends and mine day-to-day lives. I think it’s important that we’re mindful of where our students are coming from, but I’d like to add that it’s also important to note that new teachers are also included in this generation. That said, I’d like to focus most of my blog on the identity aspect of The App Generation.

To start--doing rather than being. This is something the older generations always note of the younger generations (think what the crowd of a concert looks like now vs. what it used to), and it’s actually something I disagree with. I do see truth in the argument, that a lot of experiences are had just to be documented, that more time is spent in the documentation than the participation. But isn’t it possible that the documentation--the doing--is this generation’s way of being? I don’t think we can expect that teens, and even the most recent batch of young adults, interact with the world and each other the same way previous generations have.

App Generation also mentioned that our students are more likely to have goals that are production and label oriented. “They are far more focused on ‘daily life management’ than on developing a long-term purpose.” This is completely true--because we teach them to be this way. Or at least school teaches them to be this way. The Common Core are literally the College and Career-Ready standards. We spend much time in school focusing on professional preparedness and the relevance of what we’re teaching to careers. Teaching to the PICKLE can have real significance here in making sure that students develop as people and not just as members of the future career force.

Youtube and TV shows hold “out the promise that [users], too, can become stars like their favorite TV personalities. The book relates this to increased reports of self-confidence, but decrease in ability to walk the walk, so to speak. I see this in my classroom every day. Students make claims that they’re amazing at a certain skill because they were amazing at it last year, but then are hesitant to do the work that goes into proving that, and then get flustered when they aren’t actually masters of the new level of that skill in their new grade level. We’ve been focused on getting students to be confident, but it seems like they’ve only gotten the surface level of the message. My students know it’s important to be able to say good qualities about themselves, but I’m not convinced they believe the things they’re saying, or if they actually know the meaning of what they say.

My takeaway: 1) we have a lot of work to do in the classroom to teach our students to be accurately self-reflective and 2) we have to adapt our expectations to the app mindset of our students. It’s not just them and it’s not just a phase--this is what the future looks like.