Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants

I coach basketball at Waverly-Shell Rock and I recently attended the all sport pre-season scrimmage and meetings and at this the superintendent was the guest speaker and I was very surprised to hear him suddenly begin to talk about the students being digital natives and all the the teachers and people his age being digital immigrants; since we have talked about this a number of different times this semester.

He basically talked about how the students have all this technology at their finger tips and they are so fluent at using it because they grew up with it and have been using it their entire life.  Where as himself, and the other teachers, did not grow up with all this technology and is something that they are continually working at getting familiar with as things continue to change.  He talked about his grandchildren and how they are eight and six and they can do more on a computer that he can and they are faster at everything than he is.  That is because this is the only thing they have ever known, where as he is trying to learn something brand new and it takes a lot longer when your not used to it.

Another thing that he hit on relating to this was how things are continually changing and how they will always continue to change.  He talked about how teachers can prepare for all of the current technology that is out there and become knowledgeable about what is out there, but that will all be old news in the next 20 years or so.  He mentioned that this current generation of all this technology and information will be gone within the next 15 to 20 years and we will have a whole new generation of something that we can not even imagine right now.




 Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants













Images provided by: iowaaeaonline.org