Students born after 1989 are known as “Technology Natives” how are we serving them?

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 Author Robert X. Cringley told an audience  at an annual Computer-Using Educators (CUE) conference that he asked a fifth-grade boy about technology use in his school. The boy replied, “I have to power down when I go to school!

In the 1985 book Computers and Literacy, Daniel Chandler and Stephen Marcus wrote,” If anything can be predicted about computers and literacy, it is that some people will oversell the technology as a positive force and that others will decry it as an abomination. Perhaps the most we can hope for is a continued reliance on talented teachers acquiring an informed exuberance and the young children excelling on computers in the home growing up and showing us the way. Together they will be major forces in making the most of whatever the technology has to offer us in this new information age."

Recently a student teacher sent me the following e-mail:

“Dr. Casey, I thought about you a lot in my student teaching assignment when I was teaching second graders... that class has almost zero technology in their learning. There were six computers in the classroom. The students never were able to use them in the seven weeks I was there. I finally arranged a lesson around group work on the computers, and found out that none of the log-ins worked any more.”

Another student teacher reported her classroom had six laptops, which the students never used. The master teacher never incorporated any technology into her lessons. The school had a great computer lab and sadly it was not used at all. She felt that the reason the school never had time to use the computers was because of the overwhelming pressure to raise ELL test scores. The focus on English language development shapes the school's curriculum. The school has completely taken out technology, art, and music—despite the fact that recent research about technology and ELLs shows that using computers to write stories improves English language and computer literacy skills in these children.

How are children using technology?

It’s 2008 and let’s look at where we are: Technology outside of school has exploded, with 70% of children ages  2-17 using computers, according to a 2001 article by Tamara Lewin in The New York Times. Children use cell phones, iPods, wireless Internet networks, and video games.

Since 1999, there have been big changes in the percentage of 8- to 18-year-olds who have a computer at home (73% to 86%), have two or more computers at home (25% to 39%), have Internet access at home (47% to 74%), and go online for more than an hour in a typical day. Nearly three out of four (73%) 8 to 18-year-olds read for pleasure in a typical day, averaging 43 minutes a day. Nearly one-third (30%) of young people say they either talk on the phone, instant message, watch TV, listen to music, or surf the Web for fun “most of the time” while they’re doing homework, according to the study Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year olds (available at www.kaisernetwork.org, report 7251).

With this technology explosion going on outside of schools, one might expect our schools to be leading the way in helping students master it. Some innovative ones are; however, in many places that is not the case. In 1999, I was the evaluator for the Simi Star Project funded by IBM and conducted at six school districts in California. The study tested the effectiveness of computers in the classroom and the effects of integrating technology into the curriculum. The kindergarteners and first-graders in these districts were learning to read and write. The upper-grade students won every writing contest in the district, designed Web pages, and were leading the way.

Now, 10 years later in many of these districts the  computers sit largely unused. The money has been used to hire consultants to provide teachers with training on raising test scores. In the meantime the gap between the use of technology in the world outside of the classroom and inside the classroom has grown enormously.

 It is time to discard the old paradigm and create a new technology rich classroom environment that works.  In Ocean View school district through the use of ETT Grant funding they are providing interactive Smart Board technology into every classroom and creating a completely new interactive learning environment for students and teachers.

This generation has come of age with the Internet. Author and game designer Marc Prensky calls these young people  “technology natives”—the students who have grown up with the network. Amazingly, they have become the masters of the new technologies. They learned to crawl alongside the PC.

Kids used to grow up in the dark intellectually, and educators were the people who showed kids the light. Today, kids grow up in the light—they are connected to the world through television, the Internet, social networking sites, etc. If educators were smart, they would find ways to build on this and increase children's understanding. But instead, many teachers make the kids shut off all their technological connections to the world as they enter the school building. In effect, rather than showing kids the light, they bring the kids out of the light back into the darkness. <o:p></o:p>

All teachers today  should be lighting the way for all their students. Technology is no longer an additional "gimmick," but a vital part of students' daily lives. Technology should be used in the pursuit of meaningful learning, not as a conveyor or deliverer of the designer’s message to a passive learner.

As students actively process information while doing an authentic task, they are exploring and creating their own knowledge. The students are empowered by technology rather than subjected to it. This happens when technology is used as a tool for thinking, learning, creating, and communicating in every one of our classrooms. As educators, we can create the most effective learning environments needed by the "technology natives" we now serve. Even as a "technology immigrant" born way before 1980, I can see that! 

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Dr. Jean Casey is a professor of reading/technology education at California State University, Long Beach, California, USA, and an IRA technology committee member. She conducted a three-year study (the Simi Star Project) on the integration of computers in K-1 classrooms in six California school districts.

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