Digital Natives
The South Bend Tribune has published an editorial by Jim Craig, a retired teacher. He makes some great points as to the differences in how today’s students – the Digital Natives – learn, in comparison to 10 or 20 or 40 years ago. However, we haven’t really adapted our teaching methods.
When I worked at a large university, I used to bang my head against the wall trying to get some of the professors to integrate technology into their classroom. Use PowerPoint instead of overheads, I said. Post your presentations and notes on the Learning Management System, I said. These particular professors didn’t understand. The chalk blackboard had worked for them this long. If it’s not broken, why fix it? What these professors didn’t understand is that the kids in their classes were coming into college with different skills, and access to more knowledge, than ever before. The students were practically demanding that the professors keep up. The students expected to access class notes or podcasts of the lecture online. They expected class chat rooms and message boards via the LMS. They expected to IM or at the very least e-mail their professor when they needed help.
Education has got to keep up. As Mr. Craig points out in his article, we are teaching the same way we taught 100 years ago, but the students leave the classrooms and interact digitally with the world.
The fact is, more and more bright, otherwise motivated, talented kids
are becoming disengaged by the old-fashioned school process. Their
digital-native minds don’t work the old way. They are bored out of
their minds.
I have experienced this with my own children. My
oldest is a freshman. She gets straight As, plays sports, joins clubs,
is respectful to adults and loves her friends and most of her teachers.
Any adult would say this is a kid who should be able to accomplish
anything.
There is a problem. She hates school. Absolutely
detests it. Dreads each day. Why? She is a true digital native and, as
such, is bored to tears with the way that we are running school in our
40-plus-year-old buildings that were designed 100-plus years ago. Her
mind doesn’t work that way.
South Bend Tribune: Schools need to meet the needs of digital natives
Technorati Tags: instructional design, elearning, instructional technology, digital natives
Virtual High School Meanderings
April 26th, 2006 at 7:47 am #
Requiring Virtual Schooling?
Well, let’s take another familiar thread from the archives (see Mandatory Virtual Schooling). I have noticed that coming up later this week there is an entry on the “Virtual Schooling in the News” about Michigan and that state requiring that all studen…