Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants

Digital natives vs. digital immigrants
Or Can we co-exist?

My name is Katrina, and I am a digital immigrant. After reading the article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, I can see how the term is applied to the technology skills of some of my generation. As the article points out, our kids are born into the digital age, growing up with a language we have limited experience with, and applying themselves to learning from a knowledge base we did not have access to when we were students. Over the past four weeks, I have had the opportunity to work collaboratively with some digital natives. It’s impressive how quick these individuals gather and apply information from the internet. It’s almost as if they don’t have to think about what they are doing. This, I discovered, has a lot to do with hypertext. I just found out what hypertext is. I’ve been using this feature for my own studies, but I didn’t know what it was called.

As an immigrant, I do worry that my students will forget how to use, or not have access to, the learning materials I used growing up. Reading in some cases is a lost art form. Prensky (2001) interjects that, “as a result of the ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it today [video games, cell phones, computers, CD players, the internet], today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” (Prensky, 1). Sitting down and reading a book for fun is not what kids are doing for fun today. Our challenge is to find out how to make reading fun so our students don’t loose the skill.

In order for teachers today to get their students to take them seriously and consider picking up on the lost art of reading, teachers with limited computer skills need to learn more about the digital world. In accordance with this, section three of the NETS standards for teachers’ works to get teachers better prepared. We need to provide a compromise between learning opportunities. Kids need access to the digital world, but they also need to know how to function in the hard copy world. Teachers can do this by learning how to use technology to access needed literature on-line, how to convert drill activities into interactive formats, and how to work collaboratively with students on digitally based reading and writing projects. It is a stretch to learn how to teach old content using new methods, but it’s not a new concept.

Built in reflection and critical thinking must be a part of teaching to digital natives. Sections three and four of the NETS standards for students discusses the implementation of curriculum that will encourage students to think more critically about the resources they access on-line, or distinguish between useful and non-usable information. Reflection skills are lost because the learning experience is moving so quickly, cutting out actual experiences with the learning. How likely is it that digital learning games will address the multitude of learning styles? Educators are being taught to recognize multiple intelligences in all lessons as the fourth NETS standards for teachers implies.

Finding ways to make technology a part of learning is important for today’s learners because technology is an important part of their lives. If we continue to ignore the potential that games and computers offer, we will lose our students to a void of misdirected learning. The problem with providing technology based education is that access is limited to schools that can afford to use it. Sure most schools have computer labs, but the level of instruction this article is talking about demands that every student have access to a computer at all times. Are we creating a society of division within our own national boundaries? Does poverty become the dividing line between who learns and who doesn’t? If kids in less affluent communities can not access the same information as more affluent students, then they are not able to learn equally. People who create legislation, forcing students to test and achieve the same academic proficiencies across the board are not seeing fundamental differences that exist from person to person across socio-economic borders. That’s my rant. As a future teacher, I am excited about the opportunities that technology offers the classroom today.