The Christian School Journal: How to Teach and Tame the Digital Natives: Technology Integration Article II

Like generations before them our adolescent students have acne and raging hormones. They can be imprudent, impulsive, gangly, and temperamental. They are often funny, creative, daring, and insightful. In most respects the great tapestry of their lives is like every generation before them. They struggle with temptation and their hearts and minds are filled with dreams of marriage, family, and career.

They are also different--different in a very important and profound way. They are natives--digital natives. They are students who have grown up with digital technology and in a media saturated culture where special effects, rapid movement, vivid colors, surround sound, HD TV, social networks, and computers dominate their lives. Except when required in school, most of what they read is in electronic form and hypertexted. The authors of a recent Kaiser Family Foundation sponsored study (Rideout, Roberts, & Foehr, 2005) report that "young people today spend an average of nearly 6 ½ hours a day with media. Across the seven days of the week, that amount is the equivalent of a full-time job, with a few extra hours thrown in for overtime (44 1/2 hours a week)."

Unlike our students, most readers of this blog are digital immigrants. Digital immigrants are said to have a "thick accent". That is, the digital immigrant may be able to converse and conduct business in the new digital language but they do so with a "technology accent" that makes it obvious that the language is foreign.

The Language Gap

The difficulty arises when the immigrant is teaching the native. If you have ever been in a class, listened to a sermon, or heard a speech by someone with a heavy foreign accent you will appreciate how hard it can be to understand the speaker. They may have flawless English but the accent can make understanding (and interest) more difficult.

The immigrant teaches like he did in the "home country", with rows of digital natives passively listening to a teacher lecture, writing on a white board, and occasionally asking open-ended lower level questions. Although in the average K-12 school setting students have few choices but to passively endure the process, once in college things can change--dramatically. In a very interesting blog post titled Profs Compete for Students' Attention, Amy Tiemann writes:

Immersion in online technology and media has fundamentally changed the way our minds work, the way we gather information and split our attention. It may be harder than ever for educators to avoid coming across like the monotonous economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I taught high school 10 years ago, and in many ways I am thankful that I was teaching in the era before networked laptops.
I was a talented teacher, but let's face it, when you are trying to convince 16-year-olds that they really are interested in learning chemistry at 8:30 in the morning, it helps to have a captive audience. Now teachers face new pressures: competing for their students' attention inside the classroom, and presenting material in a way that resembles the variety of mass media that teens consume on average more than 40 hours a week...
Sheryl Grant what she's seeing as an information and library sciences graduate student at the University of North Carolina. Sheryl says, "The most shocking part of going back to school at this point in my life (in her 30s) is looking around and realizing that nobody is in the room. "The professor is just another open browser window,1 of 10." Students work much as they would at their desks at home, multitasking like crazy, even when they happen to be in the live lecture hall.

While most of our students do not carry laptops to class, they can and do tune out. College students may choose to multitask on their laptops, but too many of our students respond like those in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Two Wrong Responses

The temptation is to react rather than thoughtfully respond. One reaction is to excuse one's lack of vision and innovation by blaming lazy and apathetic students, irresponsible parents, or a culture gone crazy. "My job is to teach, it is the students' responsibility to learn." "I am not here to entertain my students, I am here to teach them." Understandable, if not helpful reactions.

The second reaction is to completely excuse the students and to fall into the technotainment trap. Jamie McKenzie, an expert on technology integration, defines technotainment as:

Technology activities heavily laced with entertainment but essentially lacking in rigor or value. Technotainment often stresses technology for technology’s sake without enhancing student reading, writing and reasoning skills.

The right response is to recognize that our students are different in important ways from generations before them, to acknowledge that we have a responsibility to help our teachers explore creative ways to effectively teach the digital native, and to appropriately and effectively leverage technology to engage students, enliven classrooms, and to teach students the 21st century skills of accessing, assessing, synthesizing, analyzing, and communicating information.

We cannot ban technology and we ignore its impact and potential at our peril. We can and should harness it to expand and enhance the qualify of classroom instruction and professional collaboration. In his response to the observation that "The professor is just another open browser window,1 of 10", John Martin observes:

If the professor is simply browser window 1 of 10, the question then becomes this: Is the professor allowing this to occur because he has not created and drawn his students into an actively engaged learning community? Consider the opportunities for learning we could create if we tap our students’ affinity for technology by challenging them in class to find and share appropriate and timely references, news briefs, videos or lectures on our subject matter. Imagine if we showed our students how technology can serve them, rather than the other way around. The 21st century treats knowledge and information as currency and those who can effectively acquire, process and synthesize that knowledge into actionable projects and tangible results will be far better prepared for the world they will enter. (Emphasis added)