Thinking EdTech: Digital Natives

Monday, January 26, 2009

Digital Natives

With this week's focus on understanding the concept of digital natives and digital immigrants, we spent some time discussing what these terms mean, where we might place ourselves in (or between) these categories, and the kinds of technologies that can be used to reach our digital native students. This is an interesting place to be talking about this topic, as some of my students are digital natives and some are more toward the immigrant end of the spectrum. The whole idea of digital natives lent to a pretty good discussion, and I was pleased with some of the ideas that the students offered in how to tap into a digital native's world.

After going over a few announcements and demonstrating how to troubleshoot the in-between lecture podcasts, I had the students divide into groups of 3-4 and provided them a scaffold with which they were to come up with several examples of typical classroom tasks and ideas for using technology to approach such tasks in a more digital native way. The groups then created a digital graphic to demonstrate visually one of their examples. Some of the groups used PowerPoint and then converted the slides to JPEG files. Others used Microsoft Paint. Some used Word or Excel and took screenshots of their images and created pictures files by pasting the screenshots in Adobe Photoshop and then exporting. I circulated and helped each group as needed. If I do this activity again, I'd like to provide a job aid for how to save PowerPoint slides as picture files and how to take screenshots, as I went through the steps with many of the groups over and over again. Representatives from each group then presented their graphical representations to the class.

The remainder of class was spent working on the e-portfolios. I guided the students in how to arrange their pages in the navigation area, upload files, and create links on their pages. I am pleased that both sections are making a good deal of progress in putting together their portfolios. Hopefully, this will make the project easier on the students towards the end of the semester.

Labels: teaching, W200

posted by SG @ 2:40 PM

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