Digital Natives

As technology continues to develop in society, it must be addressed that things must be handled differently than they have in the past when dealing with education. There has been a clear distinction between two groups of people in this world: The people that have grown up surrounded by all of the tools of the digital age and are accustomed to their use, and the people that did not grow up under this technology, but are experiencing it at a later stage in their lives. The first group has been labeled “digital natives”, and the second group labeled “digital immigrants”. The differences between these two groups must be considered when considering how to adapt education to the new generations that consist of digital immigrants.

It appears as if today’s youth are not learning in school like they should be. One of the main reasons for this is that most students don’t connect with teachers, and the teacher’s style of instruction doesn’t work well with the student. This is because most of the current teachers today are digital immigrants, while the students are digital natives. Prensky (2001) states that digital immigrant instructors “…speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), [and] are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language”. Teachers grew up without all of the technology that exists today, so they don’t know how to better reach the students. It is clear that the burden to change education lies on the digital immigrants. The digital native students are not going to move backwards in their development. Teachers need to do their best to learn more about technology to relate to the students and their learning styles.

Something that can be done to bridge the gap between the two groups is education and training of the teachers. Schools are starting to budget more money towards interactive technologies in the classroom, but these things will only become useful if the teacher can use them correctly and efficiently. In an...