Article Assessment 1

Adam Zopel adamzapple88@hotmail.com 9/22/2008

Listen To the Natives by Marc Prensky

Overview

This article outlines the importance of teachers to consolidate and concentrate the important legacy knowledge, and make room for 21st century learning possibilities. In the digital age, technology allows students of all ages to essentially learn how to teach themselves.  They can do this effectively if given the opportunity to explore their options.  By advocating to include more technology within the current learning process, the exchange of information can be maximized.

By broadening the education system to become more adaptive with  instruction, collaborate with students, and adopt systems the current future already uses, mastering skills can take on a whole new form.

Reference Points

1.  Digital native, or immigrant.  Tools like computers, cell phones, ipods, and camera phones are like extensions of the brain to the digital native.

2.  Teacher qualities that focus on empathy and guidance rather than limiting the process to subject matter knowledge.

3.  Adopting systems to the teaching process like:  blogging, wiki, googling, and programming.

4.  Alternatives to hearding:  One-to-one personalized instruction, adaptive instruction, and allowing students to work in virtual groups.

5.  Collaborating with students.  Having equal student representation when decisions are being made about the education processes.  

6.  Being flexible with student use of technology and offer after school times to access technology for learning purposes. 

7.  Engaging and compelling students by speaking their language.  Find ways to educate through "gameplay". 

Reflection

I gained a great deal from Marc's point of view.  I agree, we should incorporate more technology within the classroom.  Whether it be wearing heart rate monitors and ipods in PE class to corresponding with a virtual pen pal in Egypt, there are many ways to embrace the technological advances our society has created.  I'm also a huge advocate of personalized instruction.  By adapting the methods we choose to pass information on, we just might reach more students and actually make a difference in their lives.  We can do this by collaborating with them on a personal and professional level.  As the article stated empathy and guidance as being qualities from which an administrator should look for in a "good" teacher.

This article helped me to realize the digital age is not the future, it is the present, and becoming a motivated immigrant means learning as much as I can from the natives.