Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

     According to Prensky the digital immigrant/native divide are those who where raised on technology (natives) and those who are learning how to use it (immigrant). Prensky talks about how teachers need to change the way they are teaching because students have changed the way they are learning. In the article Prensky states that students who have "Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience." I would say maybe this was more a problem back when the article was written in 2001. If using Prensky's definitions, I would consider myself a digital immigrant. I did not have a smartphone until I was a senior in high school. That was back in 2009. But I did have the internet on my computer since middle school. I noticed back then, it seemed like the internet was a scary tool my teachers would avoid. Going back to school now it is practically impossible not to have the internet or knowledge of it implemented within your classroom. On this website:https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/internet-use-by-education/ there is a chart that shows a graph of internet usage by those at different stages of education through the years.

    I enjoyed Kirschner's article which argues against Prensky. Kirschner states that just because a student knows how to use technology for social media, texting, etc. it does not mean they know how to use it to further their learning. I've experienced this myself in one of my classes. I was assigned a group project where I had to add information to a "PowerPoint." One of my group members sent me an email with a link. It led me to google slides, which I did not know even existed. I felt so "old" because I had to work on this project and try and teach myself how to enter things on google slides. I'm glad I know it exists now but I couldn't believe I did not know about it beforehand. I think it is bad to assume that a student knows or doesn't know how to use, do, or think something based off of when they were born.

I'm listing google slides just in case there is anyone out there, who like me didn't know it existed:

https://www.google.com/slides/about/