Marc Prensky, in his article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants assures that “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”. The author explains this issue as if these two generations speak different languages. From his perspective, digital natives represent the first generation to grow up with digital technology while digital immigrants learn to adapt to their environment but retain one foot in the past.
While we are still reluctant to edit a document on screen, they are the multitask generation, they communicate and express themselves through selfies and in 140 characters, they are the YouTubers generation, they use and create Apps for almost everything, to name just some examples.
As Prensky pointed out, the single biggest problem facing education today is that Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. Many teachers might be feeling this way when delivering their lessons, trying to adapt to a new environment all the time, and probably, this is how we might feel in our lessons too.
Following the categorization proposed by Mark Prensky, we have to face reality and consider ourselves as Digital Immigrant Teachers To Be but bearing in mind that there is still a long way to go and it will be mostly up to us to find ways to reach these new students and their new ways of learning.
While we are still reluctant to edit a document on screen, they are the multitask generation, they communicate and express themselves through selfies and in 140 characters, they are the YouTubers generation, they use and create Apps for almost everything, to name just some examples.
As Prensky pointed out, the single biggest problem facing education today is that Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. Many teachers might be feeling this way when delivering their lessons, trying to adapt to a new environment all the time, and probably, this is how we might feel in our lessons too.
Following the categorization proposed by Mark Prensky, we have to face reality and consider ourselves as Digital Immigrant Teachers To Be but bearing in mind that there is still a long way to go and it will be mostly up to us to find ways to reach these new students and their new ways of learning.
