A recent survey by the Israeli Center for Educational Technology
http://storage.cet.ac.il/edu2010/EduPoll_2010.pdf
shows that many students feel that school is utterly detached from the digital world in which they live and therefore makes it difficult for them to learn without the tools that serve them so well outside of school.

In order for us to “speak their language”, we should utilize some of the digital social media tools available so abundantly and freely to challenge our students to learn by communicating, collaborating and creating. By using social media platforms for learning, we can help our students to become active, involved learners.

At our school, Neveh Channah Girls HS, we try to do at least some of our learning, using wikis, internet databases and research, multimedia tools, etc. The projects we present are often challenging, but encourage our students to learn to use their digital skills to achieve active learning.
I will link here to a sampling of some of our learning projects:

Tanach – http://wiki-ut.wikispaces.com/
Torah Parshah Wiki Book – http://nc-parsha.wikispaces.com/
Colloborative Project on Jerusalem – http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com/
Geography – Ecology Movie Clip Project – http://nc-chatzer.wikispaces.com/

These are some of the projects we have used to encourage active learning in different areas of our curriculum. Not all of the learning is carried out in this fashion, but we try to do integrate some of these kinds of projects every year.

As you note we must certainly try to find different ways to make the learning interesting and relevant to our iGeneration students.

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