Digital Natives and Immigrants

Hi everyone! This week, we learned about digital immigrants and digital natives. Before this week I had never heard of these terms and had no idea what they meant. Let me give you a quick run-down. 

Digital Immigrant: someone who has had to learn how to be technologically knowledgable and who did not grow up surrounded by the technology and devices like children these day's did. 

Digital Native: someone who has grown up surrounded by technology, cell phones, etc., and who understands things in a way that grown up's do not. 

These days in learning environments, students are forced to learn in a way that students have been learning from the start. The education system has to continued to change although the brain's and ways of learning from students has. Prensky states that students today are no longer the people that our education system was designed to teach and I think that could not be more true. Students are constantly changing their ways of all other parts of their life, but our education system has not caught on just yet, and I think it's causing more problems than good. 

Another myth besides the digital native myth that Kirschner talks about is the multitasking myth. Students that multitasked actually had a lower grade point average than those who did not, and this all comes down to the idea that technology has not changed the way our brains work, but our brains have changed from technology. 

Here is a graph that shows teachers are needed to be educated on the use of technology in classrooms before they enter a class room to use that technology. Teachers are seeing the issues too.