Digital Natives Debate

The article by Prensky, M. (2001), Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants identifies and explains the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants; pointing out that it is the problem of digital immigrants teaching the natives. Prensky explains that digital natives have grown up to learn in a different way to digital immigrants, instead of picking up a book or dictionary for easy found knowledge; natives go right for the Internet. He discusses that the reason why students feel bored and disinterested in what is taught by the immigrants is because the natives are stimulated by technology, so this is therefore needs to be the centre of their learning.

Prensky underlies the importance of the immigrants (the teachers) talking and teaching in a language that is familiar to the natives (the students), it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel to the students learning styles (Prensky, M. 2001 p.4). Prensky puts forward the idea of using Legacy content and Future content as a way of teaching to the natives. Legacy being the traditional content including and reading, writing and logical thinking and Future being the digital and technological content including Interactive White Boards, Internet and YouTube videos (Prensky, M. 2001 p.4).


Personally, I agree with Prensky, M. (2001) and his article on Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, unlike the world that our teachers have grown up in, the world that myself and my peers have been surrounded by technology from the word 'go'. As technology is forever expanding and changing, if a teacher is a digital immigrant, it should be for them to make that conscious effort to include technology into their teaching, having a better chance in connecting with their students. 

Technology in general, allows the digital natives to explore areas of learning that can not be done through writing on paper, students can learn through online lessons made up by their teacher or even another teacher, students or people in general learn new things every day through exploring technology.

Here is a video about Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants:

The two types of learning style that would benefit from a video clip would be visual and auditory learners, students that are visual learners would benefit from videos visual appeal through moving objects or text. Students that are auditory learners would learn best through the oral of YouTube videos or other oral recordings, they would benefit from class discussion in working together on what happened in the video.Video clips, that are either from the Internet or personal videos allow people to gain knowledge from all over the world or from your own classroom. Technology allows us to stimulate our cognitive and creativity skills by making sense of the information being portrayed in videos, whether it is a song or clip from a movie, students manipulate the video to highlight the important points of information.



Reference used.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf