Digital Natives

I strongly agree that we have digital natives in today’s classrooms. I look at my own children everything they do revolves around the internet and their cell phones. If you take away access to either one of these items, it’s as if you took away their reason for living. In the classroom, we have to work very hard to keep the natives focused, because they are so easily distracted. Having these digital natives in the classroom has brought about a need for us as educators to become technologically savvy. In order to keep up with the natives we need to be willing to step out of our comfort zone. It seems as if these natives are always one-step ahead of us. They are able to get around blocked websites set up by the district. Yet they have a hard time reading and understanding simple math equations. As a CTE teacher I have to be very vigilant in the classroom, I utilize technology every day. I do all my quizzes and test online, but I have to make sure I pay close attention to the students when they are testing because they can find ways to manipulate the system to help them cheat. I also need to make sure that they stay on the assigned websites while in class. One way that I monitor my students is to constantly walking around the room and watch what they are doing while they are engaged in independent work. I also check their browser history to see what sites they are visiting while they are in class. Eventually someone is going to figure out how to get around this and then I’m going to have to figure out another way to keep an eye on them. An example of how these digital natives operate, I borrowed my daughter’s phone one day and in the ten minutes, she received the following two text messages. The first one stated that all girls should wear skinny jeans to school the next day to protest administration banning the jeans the day before. The next message announced a fight the next day. Both text ended by saying send to everyone in the school. I bet in the space of 30 minutes most of the students in the school received these messages, If only they would be so resourceful when it comes to academics. As an administrator, my goal would be to ensure that my staff had a of lot exposure to technology, which would lead to them becoming technologically proficient. In order to do this, if money wasn’t an issue I would send all my staff to all available technology training on a rotating basis. That would be in the perfect world, but in the world, that we live in I would send teachers who are considered technology savvy to training and have them come back and train everyone. I would put in place some sort of incentive program to help the hard-core immigrants step out of their comfort zone.