Though the statistics are staggering I have begun to think about the world my students are growing up in. The graphic above shares what people do online in 60 seconds! 60 seconds is the time it takes to microwave food, the amount of time my Mia face brush runs for, or could be the amount of time I ask students to think about things. However in those same 60 seconds there are $83,000 in Amazon sales, 104 photos shared in Snapchat, 278 tweets, and 1.8 million likes on Facebook! In a decade when our students hit twenty those numbers will be astronomical and I am assuming there will be new sites and things created that our students will be accessing. Ten years ago we did not have Facebook, Pinterest, snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. to occupy our time. I think back to the how I registered for college classes on a rotary phone, was one of 10 people in an entire dorm who had a personal computer (It was an Apple), and my cell phone was huge (Zack Morris style) and stuck to the car. I was told it was for emergencies only. Now my phone is a personal computer!

When people ask me if I think having my students on the Google Drive is too young my immediate answer is what is too young? These students are growing up in a rapidly changing world and need to be taught how to communicate, collaborate, create, innovate, and think. The drive has been a blessing for me in teaching those lifelong learning skills. It will also help our students be better prepared for those undiscovered technologies and platforms that will come their way ten years from now. I also think these students will be ready for the work place. In 60 seconds I watched students create an animation that exhibits human influences in the rain forest, choose an image to import into a slideshow, chat with a friend in Google Hangouts to figure out what they were working on, respond to a prompt, draw an image, create a table, and design a presentation. A lot can happen in 60 seconds. It is hard enough to capture it all. However it is imperative to see what our students are doing in 60 seconds so we can learn from them and start to see the world through their eyes. The world is changing and as Ferris Bueller wisely said so many years ago, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

About the Author: Rayna Freedman is beginning her 15th year at the Jordan/Jackson Elementary School in Mansfield, MA. She has taught grades 3-5 and is an ITS. She is also embarking on her doctorate through Northeastern as she hopes to change the field of education some day. Rayna is a member of the MassCUE Board of Directosr and has been presenting at the annual conference since 2010. She serves on the DESE Digital Literacy and Computer Science Standards Panel and was the North Attleboro Chamber of Commerce Teacher of the Year in 2011.

For more articles by Ms. Freedman, she is published in Early Childhood Education Today 12th and 13th edition, Building Teachers: A Constructivist Approach to Introducing Education 2nd edition, and Fundamentals of Early Childhood Education 7th edition.