Digital Natives/Immigrants

1. I believe I am a Digital Immigrant. I remember having a computer in the house when I was a teenager and I played a game called Kid Pix. I can see the benefits of technology and I am pretty well acquainted with some of the language that Digital Natives use, but I can't see eliminating all other methods that have been used to help students. Teachers should learn the language that students are speaking just like we should learn what is of interest of them.

I think it is a struggle as a teacher to validate the benefits of computers and at the same time highlight the importance of curriculum that may be considered more in line with "legacy" content. I agree with Prensky that we need to teach both. After watching the video, I was shocked at some of the numbers; average college graduate plays 10,000 hours of video games and is on the phone 10,000 minutes by that age. They spend 20,000 hours watching TV. In the article, it also said at the most of the students only read up to 5,000 hours reading.

In the 2nd part of Prensky's article, he uses evidence from neurobiology and psychology that, while I think it is interesting, we all know that practice and excessive attention to anything will make a student more proficient. So why not learn to play a sport, musical instrument or some other kind of hobby?

2. In high school and college, I don't recall much technology being used. I remember doing the Oregon Trail game in Middle school but that is about it. I was just working at a Charter School and we had many issues keeping up on our tech. As a charter school we didn't have as much tech support as we needed and computers were used so much that they had a very short shelf life. Some teachers killed the benefits of PowerPoint by overusing it and students were encouraged to use PowerPoint so much that sometimes it seemed like a back up for lack of creativity.

We had projectors in every room and a few ELMOs. The biggest challenge was really the staff's lack of knowledge on technology and we had to learn how not to depend on it - even when it would be helpful- in case something would get in our way of using it.

3. I would love to incorporate technology but not be overly dependant on it. I think that Document Viewers, Projectors, videos and music can be helpful to enhance lessons. I think Web searches can be a great tool if they are well guided and also, as a Spanish teacher, there are great games that students can use to learn grammar and memories verb conjugations. I don't think these articles changed my mind but I do feel that they were quite biased and I am nervous about Technology becoming so prevalent in students' lives if it will cause them to be less connected to other humans.