Saturday, March 3, 2012

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky


     I consider myself as digital native student because I use technology in my life daily and everywhere and I think I can not live without it. According to Marc Prensky, he defines digital native as people who grow up with all these new technology and their lives surrounded by these tools. On the other hand, he defines digital immigrants as people who they deal with technology in late stage in their lives; also, they do not accept the idea of doing perfect work by using these tools.

Mark shows some differences between digital immigrant teachers and digital native learners. Digital immigrants teachers always use teaching of step-by-step role and do not believe that students can do their work while they playing games or listening to music. On the other hand, digital native student work very fast, they can do their serious work while they listening to music or watching TV and they are amazing multi-tasks students.

Then, Mark defines new term, which is digital immigrant accent. He refers to the people who still have an impact from the past ,in other words they still have foot in the past and there are a lot of examples for those people like who call his friend to ask him if he receive the email or not or bringing people to your office in order to show the a website instead of send them the URL.


Prensky’s point of view about the biggest serious problem facing education today is that the digital immigrant teachers are struggling to teach the students who are native in technology and deal with effectively.


 In addition, he discussed whether the Digital Natives learn the old way, or should their Digital Immigrants learn the new! Therefore, he suggests two ways, which are methodology and content.
First, methodology. Teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students, and he meant by that not changing the idea itself, but going fast as the students and tries to be at the same level in multi-task ways.
Second, content. It has two kinds of content: “Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and “Future” content.
1- Legacy content is about the old and traditional curriculum and how some of these tradition contents will continue with us in the future to be important and how others will be less.
2- Future content, is to a large extent includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them. It is more interesting to student and it is more developed than the older ones.

 To reach this level of improvement to digital immigrant teachers, we need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels and using their students to guide them.

 To reach this level of improvement to digital immigrant teachers, we need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels and using their students to guide them.







Friday, March 2, 2012

“How would I use blogs, wikis and delicious with my EFL students?”


As the technology has a huge part in our lives, then we have to develop our methods of teaching by using these great effective ways. First, I have to be sure that all my students know how to use them and creating accounts on each of them. Then, I will start using them in improving reading skill to my EFL students.

By using Blogger, Delicious and Wiki, I can improve my students’ level in reading. I will use Blogger to post different interesting topics to them and they have to read and reflect on these posts, this will show me how they understand what they read and got the idea behind it. Systematically their reading skill will develop since I will gradually move from simple posts to difficult ones.

Delicious will play an important part in our learning, because all the links we need that related to reading skill will added on Delicious account and all the students will share it together. It will be like a file for our course, which we find all the sources we deal with in our Delicious.

Finally, the result and effort of our works together as a class will be on Wiki. All our creative works will add on Wiki. I will make competitions between students to the most effective reflection about any reading text, they can work as pairs and they should use PowerPoint in order to give their reflection. Therefore, Wiki helps us in cooperative work a lot.