Week 2 - Blog Posting #4 -21st Century Skills & Lifelong Learning

This series of videos and articles focused in part on teaching digital immigrants to effectively teach digital natives. In particular is noted the work of Marc Prensky, a writer who has written many pieces on the topic (his website, MarcPrensky.com, is an excellent resource for anyone wishing to learn more about this issue). Prensky's work is helpful for trying to understand how a digital immigrant teacher can reach digital native students. However, as the first digital natives are reaching adulthood we have an unusual predicament: the first wave of digital native teachers.

I was born in 1980 and have spent much of my life interested in technology. I have inevitably been the on-site tech support person for my family, friends, and co-workers for as long as I can remember. I enjoy reading about Prensky's education ideas, but I feel he’s missed an entire group of new teachers who are technologically fluent already. Our concern is not knowing that certain hardware and software exists, it's knowing how to effectively integrate that technology into education.

Mary Alice Anderson, in a paper addressed to school media specialists, is one of the few authors I've found that has begun to contemplate the needs of digital native teachers. She notes that many of the school in-service programs are geared towards introducing digital immigrant teachers to technology. What is now needed is also programs that skip the introductions and immediately begin showing technology-fluent teachers the myriad of ways they can use the technology they already know how to use in ways that can aid in their teaching.

This is a concern I have heard expressed many times throughout my time at Full Sail University. Many of my fellow students clearly buy into using technology in the classroom, and quite a few of us are already fluent in the programs we're learning to use. What we want more of are specific examples of using these programs in classroom settings, and in particular we want to know how to use technology in ways that won't be blocked by our school or board.

Anderson suggests a stronger partnership between school media specialists and digital native teachers, which I agree would be effective. I also propose that in-service training also begin taking programs to the next level and create training workshops specifically for this next generation of digital native teacher and our more advanced technology training interests.