The Transparent Tech Teacher |
Our professor posed these questions for his students this week, "As educational technologists, what did you take away from these generational differences readings? How would you handle a colleague who bought into the notion of digital natives?"
I can hardly wait to get my fingers around this week's topic! I found the literature so fascinating. While immersed in the readings, I went through an interesting series of thoughts. During the reading of Prensky's work, I immediately embraced his phraseology of digital natives. I completely agree with him regarding the differences between us and our students who have grown up in a digital world. (Some of his points, like this one, are no brainers to me.) Unlike Mckenzie, I wasn't so hard on Prensky's work, and didn't completely disagree with the premise of his paper. In fact, I was agreeing with a lot of what he had to say until he presented his solution. That's the piece that didn't sit right with me. I do not think we, as "digital immigrants," need to drop everything we're doing, including and especially our methodology, to suit the needs of our digital natives. I think we need to meet in the middle. Gamification isn't evil and unethical, as Mckenzie makes it sound, but it's not the solution for every problem we have in education, as Prensky claims. Physiological Development I was also especially fascinated with the idea that digital natives' brains may have even developed differently because of the exposure that digital natives have had to technology. It made me think of the period of my life where I learned to speak Portuguese. There were some words, a combination of the letters "lhe" in particular, that non-native speakers had major difficulty pronouncing. It was explained to us that because we had not grown up speaking Portuguese it was possible that our tongue muscle and perhaps even our hard and soft pallets had formed differently. This made it nearly impossible for us as non-native Portuguese speakers to pronounce that combination of letters correctly. Is it possible that children who have been exposed to massive amounts of technology, in any form, have differently developed brains than those of us who did not? If studies prove this to be true, it adds fuel to the fire for the need for change. But even if their brains aren't physiologically different than ours, are we generally in agreement that they learn differently in this digital age? Can we see a gap in how we are teaching and how they are learning? Is there room for growth? Is it just us, the digital immigrants who have to give? I do not believe so. Undigitizing I think rather than hurling ourselves headlong into gamifiying every single subject and concept we teach, we could expend some energy problem solving the best way to address the needs of our digital students, and the solution may actually be to help them change some of their digital ways. I disagree with Prensky, I don't think the digital immigrants have to do all the changing. Is it possible that they, especially the students who have been heavily immersed in technology, need to be undigitized? Would it be worth our while to teach them that everything isn't immediate? That sometimes they have to read before they can watch? That sometimes they don't get to watch at all because not all information comes in movie format?! I'm simply suggesting that we take the good the immigrants have to offer, because there is good present, while adjusting our methods to accommodate some of their needs.
2 Comments
Kendal Cramer
7/28/2017 05:59:32 am
While reading the three articles, I got the sense at times that there are two ends of the spectrum, when it comes to digital natives. At one end, we need to change how we teach and how students learn based on the millennial generation. The other end of the spectrum, we do not need to change anything. I believe this should fall on a continuum. There are times gamification is beneficial for students because it is a common interest, motivator, relevant to the learner and even can be a buy-in to a lesson. On the other hand, gamification to a digital immigrant may not have the same appeal or buy-in.
Reply
I agree, Kendal. If we need to have some give and take in our response to our students who have grown up in a world of technology. I feel that Prensky's stance is too one sided as he insists that we have to change everything about how we are instructing our students these days when I just don't think that's the case. I think we can enhance some of our teaching with technology when appropriate, as you stated. Thanks for sharing.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorBecky teaches tech to 3rd-6th grade students at Compass Public Charter School. ArchivesBlogrollCategories
All
|