Article Assessment 1

Michael Bauzon
michael_bauzon@hotmail.com
9/22/08

Listen to the Natives

Marc Prensky

Overview:

In Listen to the Natives, Prensky highlights the differences between students and teachers concerning use of digital technology in the schools and everyday life. He coins the terms digital native, referring to today's students, and digital immigrants, those who were not born into the digital world, to help readers get a better picture of the generation gap that exists between educators and students.

Prensky goes on about different instructional methods educators must use in order to successfully engage learning for digital natives. According to Prensky, digital tools like cell phones, blogs, podcasts, video games, and web-based data storage can increase student collaboration both in and out of the classroom.

Article Reference Points:

• Digital Natives refer to today's students, fluent in digital computer language, video games, and the internet.
• Digital Immigrants are those who are not born into the digital world.
• Teachers must encourage decision making among students, involving students in designing instruction and getting input from students about how they would teach.
• The cell phone is one of the most important 21th century tools.
• Herding is students' involuntary assignment to specific classes or groups. This does not benefit students.
• One alternative to herding is one-to-one personalized instruction
• The other alternative to herding is having students select their own groups, not necessarily restricted to the classroom.
• Programming is the key skill necessary for 21st century literacy, and many students are already proficient in programs such as Flash.

Reflection:

I'm not fond of most of Prensky's solutions to bridging the generation gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants within the classroom. I agree that students should use digital tools and that many teachers need to learn how to integrate usage of these tools in their curriculum, but using video games to teach literacy and algebra is not effective.

Student engagement, one of the more important aspects of teaching and learning, can hardly be focused on algebra through most digital tools. While it's true that the subject matter might be presented in a more entertaining fashion, the old pencil-and-paper way of doing math homework is still the most effective method. Video games to teach math? I predict more distraction than learning.

In my curriculum, lesson planning, and delivery, the digital tools mentioned in the article-camera phones, googledocs, blogs, Flash, wikis, etc- are of little to no worth. I do use a class blog to post homework, quotes, and notes to the classes. Other than that, I still teach math on the big board in the front of the room. As a teacher the most I can take away from the article is a knudge toward learning math-effective teaching technologies such as smart boards, tablet PCs, blogs, and of course the graphing calculator.