by Marc Prensky Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The
numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and
instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000
hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen-all
before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These
are today's ―Digital Native‖ students.
1
In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital
Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today's
educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives' brains are likely physically different as a
result of the digital input they received growing up. And I submitted that learning via digital
games is one good way to reach Digital Natives in their ―native language.‖
Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.
by Marc Prensky Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The
numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and
instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000
hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen-all
before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These
are today's ―Digital Native‖ students.
1
In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital
Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today's
educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives' brains are likely physically different as a
result of the digital input they received growing up. And I submitted that learning via digital
games is one good way to reach Digital Natives in their ―native language.‖
Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.
Hi.
I wrote a paper about digital natives as part of an anthropology assignment for a doctoral course. Researchers from around the world have empirically proven that Prensky's theories are false. Additionally, while neuroscience has shown that brains do change as a result of neuroplasticity, to argue that it is generational is also a false claim.
Though cognitive theory shows that learners bring their prior experiences to the interpretation of new educational opportunities - impacting attention and interpretation - all generations have had this occur. There is merit to the point that we should take learner's prior experience into consideration when designing instruction; however, Prensky's digital native claims may have done more to create tension between students and teachers than to provide instructional support.
If you would like any of the scholarly studies, I have a published reference list at http://brholland.com/reference-list.
Beth
"this gives students more of a choice to do the kinds of assignments they want to do, as opposed to just the teacher deciding." You would certainly need to check that they were doing challenging, relevant work.
Concrete idea for how to answer the above, last question. He used a concrete example from a 3rd grade class: "Have the kids create a podcast every week of what they learned. Have a writer, producer, mixer, etc." Would you do that during class time or outside of classtime?
"Another solution: you need to be more reflective on the body of work that you are doing. What have I learned? Where have I been and where am I going?" How do you do this?
"Teach kids really good research skills. Have them look up assignments and related material from other teachers from all over the world." And then do what with them?
"One solution: have an official classroom researcher everyday in your class." The job would be to gather the websites that will be used connected to whatever it is you're studying? Is that right? Need more thought on this.
"Final Myth: Tech will make kids smarter. Actually it's a distraction. Creates more plagiarism and people wanting to get things done. Losing critical thinking." How can we use the enormous resources of the internet and at the same time increase critical thinking?
"Another myth: the internet will give people a range of ideas. The opposite is true. People search out their version of the truth, e.g. Fox News or Huffington Post." I find this to be incredibly true.
I tried out Diigo educator and was REALLY impressed. This let me very quickly (and with no email addresses needed) set up accounts for 30 students. I then created a group for all 3 classes to use and added all the students to the group. In this case, since I only have one more day with the kids and am not sure if they'll be using Diigo after this, I just used the 30 accounts for multiple classes, but if this were for my actual students, I would have created an account for each student. Anyway, once all the students were added to the group, I just instructed them to make sure to share every bookmark for this project with the group. All of the students will then be able to view all of the bookmarks. Again, we couldn't install even the diigolet, but saving right from Diigo worked fine for our purposes. They used the same technique of tagging with last name, class hour, and other appropriate tags.
I taught both of these methods in a 45 minute class period and the actual explanation of the bookmarking technique took only 7-10 min. of each class period. The kids (7th graders) picked up on it EXTREMELY fast.
for long term use and for individual projects I strongly recommend using Diigo educator, especially since I use Diigo so heavily in my personal and professional web research.
The technology is still very visible, if students are talking in terms of 'computers' rather than the skills involved. We don't talk about 'paper' but writing, critical reading etc. Yet here the platform itself is emphasized. Early days, I guess.
Well, the problem here is that some of that can be ascribed to novelty. Once every class uses 'interactive technology' (yuk) then how much difference will there be? The tools are great. All tools can be useful. But focus on the pedagogy, people!
I'm for focusing on understanding. I love the word "pedagogy" because most lay people don't really know what it entails--theory (which can be anything institutional or community deems effective or correct), practice (which, as we know, can be summed up with the phrase "mileage will vary"), and some third thing which if I could come up with it I'd have the magic 3 elements in an effective argument. I think effective tools used effectively by effective teachers (there! 3 uses of one adjective!) will remain effective as long as they are used to promote understanding. No argument here, Ed, just sayin'...
Perhaps the magic third thing would be 'attitude' or 'state of mind'? Alternatively, perhaps another of those non-transparent terms, 'praxis'. The point I was trying to make, of course, was that it ain't what you use, it's the way that you use it.
"I think the kids that have turned school off because it's boring to them will come here and see something familiar,"
Boring and familiar seem to me to be closely related, not opposites. I suspect that often when students say their learning environment is 'boring' they mean 'challenging'.
Computer technology in my classroom has revolutionized my teaching of biology. Instead of static images on a printed page, or talk and chalk, my students can manipulate 3-D images of DNA, RNA and proteins. These have even been embedded in a research-based learning progression that leads the students to a robust understanding of the foundational elements of molecular literacy.
1. Atoms and molecules are constantly in motion. (A visualization is not possible on a 2-3 printed page.)
2. All atoms and molecules have a 3-D structure that determines how they interact with other particles.
3. Charges and other intermolecular forces play a role in atomic and molecular interactions.
My students can see these for themselves, change the number of particles in a box, or the distribution of charge on a large particle or the temperature of the box and other thought experiments which they can follow in real-time.
There is no way, I could do that without the computer!
I like the idea of concentrating on one thing -- let the kids know what I'm looking for during the week. Eg. on the board it could say "conference focus"
Gradual Release of Responsibility: Student learns to do heavy lifting
Ask another adult to give feedback.
defeated. Here you will find 20 ideas and techniques on how to give effective learning feedback that will leave your students with the feeling they can
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the
most crucial factor of all.
young people today write far more than any generation before them
(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense
of what constitutes good
kids today can't write—and technology is to blame.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we
haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't
killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold
new directions
Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that
wasn't a school assignment
Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what
rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their
tone and technique to best get their point across.
students today almost always write for an audience
(something virtually no one in my
generation did) gives them a different sense
of what
constitutes good
"A programme that brings live fish into classrooms to teach the fundamentals of biology not only helps students learn, but improves their attitudes about science, a new study finds.
The study of nearly 20,000 K-12 students, who raised zebrafish from embryos over the course of a week, found that kids at all grade levels showed significant learning gains. They also responded more positively to statements such as "I know what it's like to be a scientist." The results, to be published by the journal PLOS Biology, suggest that an immersive experience with a living creature can be a particularly successful strategy to engage young people in science, technology, engineering and maths."
It is "tracking." I'm not sure what his point is here.
Unfortunately, the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals have attempted to eliminate the achievement gap by eliminating achievement.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
I once held a department meeting when I was out of the building using this. I have also used it while showing a movie to classes; students can comment and get questions answered right away.
I've used it during a video in class. Kids are able to pose questions to each other, provide comments, state their opinions and express themself. Worked great.
Recently I had 9th graders talking to each other and me while they read a selection from their text. A couple of students did not like it, but most said it was helpful in understanding the material they were reading.
I use this often during my PBL activities. As students are researching, they post links to websites that are helpful for others and they post their ideas. At the end of the lesson, we look over the list one last time and make our whole-class decision based on our findings. My 5th graders love it and it has made their problem solving much better since it is based on research and collaboration.
4th graders used Today's Meet during Social Studies. They provided details related to a topic's main idea while studying a region of the United States. Worked great!
The current structure of the school day is obsolete, most would agree. Created during the Industrial Age, the assembly line system we have in place now has little relevance to what we know kids actually need to thrive
Yet therein lies the paradox. It’s exactly during these uncertain times when people must be willing to try new things, to be more open, curious and experimental, she said. In education, although there are great new models of learning and schooling, they are the exceptions, and the progressive movement has not gained much momentum.
“One thing we know for sure is that kids learn better when teachers are invested and paying attention and showing they care,” she said. “The biggest impact you’ll have as a teachers is the relationship you establish with your student.”
The five criteria that Challenge Success brings to schools attempts to modernize the obsolete system in place today: scheduling, project based learning, alternative assessment, climate of care, and parent education.
Research shows that kids do better in classes where teachers know their names and say hello to them, and when they have their own advocates or advisers at school.
wonderful interactive site that offers great instruction on preparing for and carrying out a research project. Specifically designed for elementary aged students, and uses bright graphics, a cartoon dog, and even has a sound version.
a very popular web-based game design environment. Global Kids http://olpglobalkids.org/ is using it to run social benefits game design contests and badging programs. They are getting 100+ new game design entries per week. From the parents' guide: Gamestar Mechanic is currently supported by a partnership between the Institute of Play and E-Line Media. The game was originally developed by Gamelab in partnership with the Institute of Play and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab (AADLC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Initial funding for the game and companion learning guides came from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The design of the game is based on research by some of the leading academics in the field including Katie Salen (Executive Director of the Institute of Play and curriculum author for the New York City Public School Quest To Learn) and James Paul Gee (author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy).
This site has students creating games from scratch and putting them out into the world for feedback within the Gamestar Mechanic community. Students use math, problem solving, writing skills and more to make their games interesting. I think this could be used in the classroom as a theme-based project or just to get students interested in coding.
Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps:
*Use it as background information
*Use it for technology terms
*Use it for current pop cultural literacy
*Use it for the Keywords
*Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it)
Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia
20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia
Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica
Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006
And:
Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia
**Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response.
Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.
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Excellent perspective on "The 'W' Word" - use it wisely for what it is - high school and college kids shouldn't be citing any general knowledge encyclopedias for serious research - but that doesn't mean there aren't some excellent uses for it.
This report seems short on research and long on guesses that seems to be trying to link sensational but unrelated facts. I see little attempt made to define the terms. The teachers I know who use facebook to communicate with students do so to keep students thinking about their classwork and deadlines. The "cyberbaiting" which the reporter tries to link to facebook friending with a "perhaps"...would rarely be related. From what I've seen, kids cyberbait the teachers who are least likely to use or understand social media at all. I would imagine that a teacher who is online with students would be least likely to be a target. All this is unoffical guess, but the article does little to provide me with facts or information to contradict this.
"A new study from North Carolina State University finds that educating children about climate change increases their parents' concerns about climate change.
"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues, but this is the first experimental study demonstrating that climate education for children promotes parental concern about climate change," says Danielle Lawson, lead author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State."
"if you do not aggressively deal with cheating your students will lose respect for you and what you are teaching. Cheating will happen, and you must be prepared to deal with it. Worse yet, though, is that when a teacher sees a student cheat, it often forever taints his impression of the child. Before talking about how to deal with cheating, it might be useful to put it in a reasonable context."
Swift and draconian teaches one thing: don't get caught. They know they're not supposed to cheat and, largely, why. Although I will agree with the point regarding a lack of intrinsic value in rules for teenagers. However, there is no reason we can't try to begin developing a sense of genuine effort for ones own gain. Authentic assessment is a much more productive approach to reducing cheating behaviors. Good scaffolding and levels of feedback on research projects discourage academic dishonesty simply due to the attention the work receives.
Kids cheat because they think they can get away with it. Why? Because objective assessments make it easy? Because teachers don't pay enough attention to the work? If we, as professionals, model a means of making work easier for us, how can we blame the kids for following our lead?
When it comes to motivating people to learn, disadvantaged urban adolescents are usually perceived as a hard sell. Yet, in a recent MetLife survey, 89 percent of the low-income students claimed I really want to learn applied to them. What is it about the school environment pedagogy, curriculum, climate, organization that encourages or discourages engagement in school activities? How do peers, family, and community affect adolescents attitudes towards learning? Engaging Schools reviews current research on what shapes adolescents school engagement and motivation to learn including new findings on students sense of belonging and looks at ways these can be used to reform urban high schools. This book discusses what changes hold the greatest promise for increasing students motivation to learn in these schools. It looks at various approaches to reform through different methods of instruction and assessment, adjustments in school size, vocational teaching, and other key areas. Examples of innovative schools, classrooms, and out-of-school programs that have proved successful in getting high school kids excited about learning are also included.
Mixbook
(or Mixbook for Educators) is a
photo-based creation platform that offers
hundreds of layouts and backgrounds to choose from
along with customizable frames and text to make your book beautiful.
Just pick a layout, drag-and-drop your photos into the photo slots, and
edit to your heart's content.
Though the site's examples suggest using the books to gather wedding,
travel, and baby albums, this program can absolutely used to create
stories around historic photographs and artifacts, original art, to
produce a class yearbook, to share an oral or personal history or
journey, to tell the story of a field trip. Mixbook
for Educators now offers a secure collaborative environment for
sharing their ebooks, as well as discounts on printed products, should
you choose to print. (A similar option is Scrapblog.)
Storybird,
a collaborative storybook building space designed for ages 3-13,
inspires young writers to create text around the work of professional
artists and the collection of art is growing.
Two (or more) people create a Storybird
in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting
pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird
privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be
printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared
through a worldwide library. Storybird is also a simple
publishing platform for writers and artists that allows them to
experiment, publish their stories, and connect with their fans.
Myth and Legend Creator 2 shares a collection of traditional stories from England and
around the world to hear and read. The site offers historical
context for each story, story time lines and maps, ideas for use of the
story in the classroom, and student work inspired by the story. The Story Creator--with
its libraries of backgrounds, characters, props, text bubbles, sound
and video recording tools, and options to upload--provides students
easy opportunities to create their own versions of traditional stories.
The Historic
Tale Construction Kit is similar in that it helps students
construct stories around a theme, in this case stories set in the middle
ages with movable, scalable beasts, folks, braves, buildings. and
old-style text.
Tikatok is a platform devoted to kid book publishing at a variety of levels. Children have the option of exploring a collection of interactive
story templates called StorySparks prompts, personalizing an existing
book with their own names in Books2Go, with their own names, or
starting from scratch in Create Your Own Book. Tikatok’s Classroom Program allows teachers to share lesson plans, view and edit students' work online, encourage collaboration,
and track
writing progress.
Big Universe is both an online library and a publishing and sharing community for grades K through 8. Using Big Universe Author, students may create, research, and collaborate on books using a library of more than 7000 images and interactive tools.
Children who read on grade level by the end of third grade are more successful in school, work, and in life. This KIDS COUNT special report affirms a commitment by the Casey Foundation to help ensure that all students are proficient in reading by the end of third grade and help narrow the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children.
globalwrobel on 26 Jul 17by Marc Prensky Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen-all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today's ―Digital Native‖ students. 1 In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today's educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives' brains are likely physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up. And I submitted that learning via digital games is one good way to reach Digital Natives in their ―native language.‖ Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.
Beth Holland on 28 Jul 17Hi. I wrote a paper about digital natives as part of an anthropology assignment for a doctoral course. Researchers from around the world have empirically proven that Prensky's theories are false. Additionally, while neuroscience has shown that brains do change as a result of neuroplasticity, to argue that it is generational is also a false claim. Though cognitive theory shows that learners bring their prior experiences to the interpretation of new educational opportunities - impacting attention and interpretation - all generations have had this occur. There is merit to the point that we should take learner's prior experience into consideration when designing instruction; however, Prensky's digital native claims may have done more to create tension between students and teachers than to provide instructional support. If you would like any of the scholarly studies, I have a published reference list at http://brholland.com/reference-list. Beth
