Week 5 Post: Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

This week's articles and topics were very interesting to me because they address the issue of changes over time in education. First, the concept of digital natives versus digital immigrants was one that made me reflect very deeply on my own schooling as a young child. I can vividly remember the very first time I used the internet and it was in the fourth grade. Prior to that year, we had a computer class once a week to get us familiar with this "new" form of technology. After fourth grade, we starting having computer class twice a week to learn all the things that could be found on the web and how it would be useful to our education. Since elementary, I have always tried to keep up with the latest technology, but there are now too many things out there to learn to know everything there is to know. One great thing I have done is enrolled in the CEP 416 course here at the university to try to improve my computer and internet skills. Even though I have always tried my best, I was shocked to find that I only knew 2 of the terms on the Digital Natives quiz. Even though I was very limited in my knowledge on that quiz, I do consider myself more of a native than an immigrant with technology because I have constantly been around it since a very young age. Becoming "literate" in digital technology is a process that has many similarities with the process of becoming literate described in Tompkins book.
I found Tompkins information to be very interesting because it made me remember back to when I was learning how to read and write. Even though there are some components of my learning that I don't remember learning vividly, such as phonetics, I was able to relate to Tompkins' work by reflecting on my learning of the Spanish language still to this day. The strength of Tompkins piece is that it covered all the parts of becoming literate, not just speaking, writing, reading, and listening seperately. I really enjoyed the illustrations and found this chapter to be very useful for my future students' learning. In addition to Tompkins, Gibbons book on Scaffolding Language and Learning was also very interesting because it made me realize that there are a variety of ways to teach language arts to children. I can remember that each year in language arts my teacher would have us complete a certain number of book reports, a certain number of papers, and always work on spelling and grammar. Those assignments always turned me away from language arts because they seemed so boring to me. Gibbons' ideas for how to let students be creative and how to vary the assignments were very interesting to me. With the No Child Left Behind Act and such strict time constraints, teachers have been more reluctant to allow their students to be creative in order to prepare their students to pass the state tests. In the long run, as Gibbons points out, allowing students to have a more well-rounded creative experience with language arts will actually make them become more literate and perform just as well on state tests. By utilizing the information found in the readings from this week, I look forward to experimenting with a variety of teaching strategies and lessons to create strong levels of literacy in my future students.