Digital Natives

   This week after reading Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky, and The Myths of the Digital Native and the Multitasker by Paul Kirschner I’ve found both to have valid arguments. I fall into the category of the digital native. Being born in the late, late 1990’s I grew up watching television, getting my first phone in the 6th grade, and having to do homework on our home computer. During elementary school, I remember them rolling in the TVs from the library or the projectors that teachers could write on with a felt marker. Then in middle school graduating to the smartboard. Seeing those technological advances was awesome and since it happened while growing up it felt very normal to have things constantly changing and improving. This is where I disagree with Prensky’s logic and side more with Kirschner, I feel like my teachers were very adaptive with the new technologies that came in. In fact, we were often given internet scavenger hunts and tasked with multimedia projects, and even allowed to listen to music during study periods. Of course, there were the few teachers with tenure who hadn’t adopted new teaching methods and needed help with the smart boards but I never felt like they stunted my learning. For example, I had one teacher Mrs. Steelhead she was in her sixties I believe and she would have us put together review questions for a quiz into a Kahoot for her as extra credit. The only thing that impacted my learning then and now is my attention span I read for 15 minutes and find myself drifting off thinking about something completely off-topic. But that doesn’t mean my teachers and or their teaching methods are boring it just means I need to work on removing the distractions around me aka my phone.

    An idea for how this course could implement a new digital native methodology would be playing Kahoot, or virtual game board like chutes and ladders (correct answers move you forward, wrong ones send you back) these could be each week on the terms we are learning, where everyone in the class could have a friendly competition. 

Below I included a TED talk that gives another perspective on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. 

Digital natives vs. digital immigrants | Sree Sreenivasan | TEDxNewYork