Reflection+5


 * //Reflection 5//**
 * //Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants//**
 * //It's amazing how our students have changed, as today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. A big discontinuity has taken place. Today's students represent the first generations to grow up with new technology. they have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. It's likely that our students' brains have physically changed from ours as a result of how they grow up. Our students today are all (native speakers) of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. Those of us who were not born into the digital world, but have become fascinated by most aspects of the new technology are (Digital Immigrants).//**
 * //We can notice that these Digital Immigrants can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first. The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immegrant instructors, who speak an outdated language, are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.//**
 * //Didital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They function best when net worked. They prefer games to serious work. But Digital Immigrants have very little appreciation for these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice. The skills are totally foreign to Immigrants who choose to teach slowly step by step and seriously.//**
 * //Digital Immigrants don't believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they themselves can't. They assume that learners are the same as they have always been. That assumption is no longer valid. Often from the Natives' point of view. Their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention. They don't like their instructors to read all the time from their textbooks.//**
 * //Kids born into any new culture, learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don't know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Today's teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This means going faster, less step by step, more in parallel, with more random access among other things.//**
 * //As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives. The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the second involves new content and thinking. Teaching Digital Natives needs to invent computer games to do the job, or to invent Digital Native methodologie For all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us. A frequent objection heard from Digital Immigrant instructors is that " this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn't work for my subject." this is just rationalization and lack of imagination.//**
 * //So if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives, they will have to change. It's high time for them to stop their grousing. They will succeed in the long run- and their successes will come that much sooner if their administrators support them.//**