February+Digital+Natives-Digital+Immigrants

“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”

Prensky identified two categories of people in his article and named them Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. Digital Immigrants are defined as anybody who was not born into the digital world but have adopted some aspects of new technology. Digital Natives are today’s students who have spent their entire lives surrounded with technology. Prensky believes that Digital Natives think and process information very differently than Digital Immigrants and because of this, cannot learn as effeciently in the tradition classroom. Digital Natives like to parallel process, multi-task, prefer graphics, and like to work cooperatively. As a result of growing up immersed in technology, he also stated that their brains are wired differently. Most teachers are Digital Immigrants who, according to Prensky, do not accept the new learning styles of Digital Natives and do not appreciate their new skills.

Teaching styles are outdated and new methodology needs to be incorporated into every classroom. First teachers need to learn to communicate in the language of our students, Digital Natives, and second teachers need to rethink the content. Some of the “legacy” content has become less important so it’s time to discontinue time spent on outdated content. “Future” content is largely digital and technological and is of great interest to the students. This content includes both software and hardware, and it also includes the ethical and political aspects of technology.

As teachers we need to create a “new classroom” created to meet the individual needs of our Digital Native students. In the past we have created programs to meet the needs of our special needs students and of our gifted and talented students. Now we face our greatest challenge by creating a classroom incorporating technology in all subjects at all levels. How are we going to do this? That’s the question, but we do have our students to guide us in developing this new classroom.