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Date Posted: 12:37:46 03/11/11 Fri
Author: Tânia Pereira (Digital Natives and Imigrants)
Subject: About task 3

Write a position paper about the digital generation of students
and the challenges we face in teaching them.
(Task 3 , group 1, Tania)

PRENSKY says that the quality of the educational system is declining because we ignore the fact that students have changed. He points out that what we have now is a single generation which speaks a completely new language. It is because the nowadays students were born surrounded by all kinds of gadgets which are like toys for them. They spend much more time playing video and computer games, emailing, talking on the phone, watching TV, etc than reading and sometimes they can do more than one thing at the same time because today’s students who are considered native can think and process information fundamentally different from us who are described as immigrants. According to PRENSKY all our students today are native speakers of the digital language.

The author points out some differences between students and teachers nowadays. He says that the immigrants (teachers) read manuals while the native (students) just follow the program to discover how things work, print messages to read or documents to be edited instead of doing it on the screen and lots of other things that let us know how different we are from our students. It is because we (teachers) are now in the process of learning a new language while the students can easily deal with it because it is part of their lives.

Those of us who were not born into the digital era but have to face t all those new apparatus and adopt many or most aspects of these new technologies in our way of teaching are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. As we can see through the video “Welcome to the Digital Generation” there is a big lack of interest in paying attention to the teacher’s explanation just because he uses the board and they get really involved when they see those new piece of technologies falling on their hands. The students don’t want us to teach them but to give them directions to learn by themselves. According to PRENSKY that is what today’s education should be: not just “relevant” or “authentic” but real; not just preparing students for some test based on “standards” but actually dealing with the problems of our world realities.(It’s clearly shown by him in the text Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools when he points out the example of using the NET to interact with scientist and students from other countries to study about petrol)

In conclusion our biggest challenge is to use our knowledge and improve our relationship with the new tech in hope of being able to give all of our students the motivation they need to work, create, and succeed in their learning and later in lives.


Tânia Martins Pereira

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