Digital Natives call for a change.

After reading Prensky’s article ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’ I started to think about the importance of using technology in our classrooms. Nowadays, it’s not only a tool to motivate our students or keep them engaged; technology has changed our learner’s thinking processes and we can’t ignore this, teaching “slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually”.

Even though there are some teachers who deny the importance of technology and spend their time criticizing the way in which the new generations have changed, I think most of the Digital Immigrant teachers accept the technological development and try to learn about it in order to improve their lessons.

Before continuing I want to explain why I speak of Digital Immigrants in the third person. I was born in 1993 and, even though I was not born in this technological era – or at least some devices were not used by children – I spent part of my childhood and adolescence using computers and mobile phones. I really love technology and whenever I can I watch tutorials to learn how to use programmes such as Photoshop or new social networks. I search for information on the internet, I read through my netbook, I always have Facebook and Twitter open and I answer the messages I receive on Whatsapp while I study. I definitely consider myself a Digital Native.

Now yes, I will share some effects of technology on classrooms:

• It has changed students and teachers’ roles: When students use technology they are “actively making choices about how to generate, obtain, manipulate, or display information.” Some of them can even become coaches, helping their classmates to use technology. The teacher becomes a facilitator or monitor and is no longer the controller of everything.
• It develops student’s motivation and self-esteem: We all know how students enjoy using technology, how they prefer doing the same activity in a computer rather than with pen and paper. “Compared to conventional classrooms with their stress on verbal knowledge and multiple-choice test performance, technology provides a very different set of challenges and different ways in which students can demonstrate what they understand”. At the same time, technology empowers students. They have the immediate results of their performance and they can see how much they are progressing. The simple fact of learning to manipulate a new technological device will foster their autonomy and give them the feeling that ‘they CAN do it’.
• It increases cooperative work: As I mentioned, some students become tutors and they help each other to successfully complete the task that is proposed. What’s more, “students often look over each other’s' shoulders, commenting on each other’s' work, offering assistance, and discussing what they are doing”.
• It expands the audience: Student’s work is no longer aimed to the teacher or to other peers. Through Skype, for example, they can communicate with native speakers, and through social networks or blogs, their works can be shared to the entire world.

Of course there is much more than this if we want to comment on the topic, but just with what I have mentioned we can recognize how important it is for us, as teachers or future teachers, to become acquainted with these technological changes and learn about the best ways to include them in our lessons so as to benefit our students and to adapt to the way in which they learn.  It’s high time to accept the changes and, instead of complaining, profit from them.

If you want to know more about the effects of technology on classrooms read "Effects of Technology on Classrooms and Students." by the U.S. Department of Education.