My thoughts on Prensky's Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants parts I and II

Part I:

Prensky raises some interesting points in this article. There are ideas which had not occurred to me prior to my reading it, but which seemed obvious on reflection.

Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach: Prensky explains that they have not just changed incrementally or in terms of style (linguistic and aesthetic) but that changes in the ways they learn and view the world due to the rapid spread of digital technology in recent years. I think this is probably the most important point he makes in the article as we often talk about how the technology is changing but forget (or don’t realise) that the newer generations are adapting and changing with it. So we shouldn’t be concentrating solely on ways of implementing ICT in our schools, but also on how to interact with the digital natives as Prensky calls them.


today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors: Teachers are going to need to understand these differences and how to work with them rather than trying to make the students change their ways of thinking to suit the teaching. It will be difficult for many but I agree that it is something which needs to be done for the sake of these children’s education. If we can’t engage them then not only are they not achieving what they are capable of, but teaching them will be very difficult.


Prensky talks about the differences between digital natives and digital immigrants and I find it interesting that I relate more to the immigrant descriptions. I feel though that there should perhaps be sub-divisions within these categories as there are people who are more ‘immigrant’ than me (my parents for example), and there are those who are less (some of my peers). A person’s up-bringing and personal characteristics also play a part in whether you are native or immigrant as well as which generation you belong to. For example, I have peers who are far more computer literate than I am and I suspect that this is in some part because they want to be, or they may have had more ICT opportunities at school (there was only 1 PC at my primary school which was hardly ever used and my first IT lessons came in my second year at secondary school). I can adapt to new technologies and learn how to use them but I do not have an innate desire to explore ICT as some people I know do.

Digital natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task: I feel that teaching at the moment is moving towards a faster pace but is still quite slow. Teaching a year 1 class I noticed that they weren’t able to sit still for very long and wanted short, quick explanations even though many of them needed the tasks explaining to them more than once. I suspect that they are at the beginning of their digitally native life and so like to have information quickly but aren’t quite ready yet to process it at the same speed. I agree with Prensky when he comments that they need instant gratification and frequent rewards. This was very evident when teaching.

I don’t think we should discourage the use of ICT in the classrooms (calculators and PCs for example) but I do believe that we need to teach the children how to use them effectively.

Part II


Prensky opens this article with a number of bewildering figures showing the amount of time spent on different ICT activities by digital natives. Seeing this data in black and white confirmed for me that teachers really do need to start changing the way they teach in order to reach these children.

The brain is massively plastic. It can be, and is, constantly reorganized: I was under the impression that the brain had some flexibility to it due to the nature of learning and that when we encounter something new we don’t automatically forget something we already knew (obviously there is a lot of repetition needed to retain information as we have areas of our brain which deal with short and long-term memory), but to learn that it changes physically was very interesting.


Research led by social psychologists shows that people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about different things, they actually think differently: At the moment we are living in what could be called a split culture where we have digital natives and immigrants and it does not surprise me to learn that there could be possible differences in the way each group thinks.

Prensky finds that the amount of practice required when learning a new task reading for example) is similar to the pattern of time spent playing video games by the digital natives. It comes as no surprise then to find that the brains and ways of thinking of these natives are different to the immigrants and I am in agreement with Prensky when he proposes that children’s brains are being ‘reprogrammed’; it seems logical!


When discussing attention spans I find that what Prensky states is what I realised when teaching; that children do appear to have short attention spans when faced with a traditional method of teaching. It is not that they can’t concentrate as they spend hours engrossed in TV, video games, the internet etc, but that this way of teaching was not engaging them as it did not meet their preferred way of thinking. I had come to assume that it was because of the amount of work the children were expected to do that they were not paying attention, that perhaps they were being over-loaded. But in fact I now think that the pace was too slow and so they were switching off..

Reading this article has made me realise that my teaching needs to be not only pitched at the right level but also paced at the right speed. It might be beneficial to teach more in short bursts rather than have a long input and an equally long time when the children are working independently. Short and to the point may be the answer.

Changing Paradigms by Marc Prensky

I found the article Chaning Paradigms by Marc Prenksy very interesting and thought that it highlighted some important points. My thoughts are below:

In this article Prensky discusses the idea that education today, in today’s technologies, is utterly removed from that of the past. Students of all ages do not want to be lectured to, they want to be able to find information out for themselves and use it in a way that is appropriate to them.

I think that in order to be able to teach in the twenty-first century we don’t need to focus on which technologies we are using, but rather how we and the students can use them. I feel that there is so much concern about giving didactic lessons on how to use certain computer programs when what we should be doing is focusing on the task rather than the equipment. We need to treat computers and other ICT equipment as we treat pens and paper; it’s there, we all use it and it’s going to remain in our society for a long time.

Engaging the children and motivating them to want to learn is the most important aspect of teaching and if we continue to read out our PowerPoint presentations then we are doing neither of these things and the children will become bored.

I agree with Prensky in that we need to devise challenges for the children which give them the opportunity to investigate, share and discuss with their peers. I feel that education is no longer about simply telling the children something to remember in order that they pass the exams, children need to learn to investigate and solve problems for themselves and they need to use ICT to do that because, let’s face it, it’s what they do best.


I don’t agree with Prensky when he comments that the demise of the classroom isn’t far away, I think that classrooms won’t be used as we use them now, but that they will become more of a meeting place for groups of children embarking on investigative work, and undoubtedly they will eventually be filled with numerous examples of ICT equipment.

Final blog

So, here it is, the final, in reasonable length list of blog entries. When we were first told that we were to create a blog which would be updated regularly I have to say that I was a bit sceptical and not particularly interested in doing it. However, after quite a few months of frequent blogging I have actually enjoyed the experience and often looked forward to composing my entry.

I have found this blog site very easy to use not only in writing but also for attaching photos and weblinks. I have created a few hyperlinks in this blog as a whole and this is a very useful skill which I will definitely take with me long after the blogging has stopped.

I doubt I would ever blog again merely because I don't really have anything to blog about and I'm not sure exatly who would be interested enough to read what I might write, but I can see how useful it is as a form of communication and have actually added the blog of a famous write/actor/presenter to my favourites, and yes I do read it often!

In a school context I think blogging could be useful in KS2 for the children to write about the topics they are currently studying or even to keep up with school work while on holiday or ill. For them to have access to other people's blogs, say at a school in a different country, would be beneficial as there is much they could learn and the information they would be receiveing would be coming straight from the source. I think then that blogs are useful educational tools also and I hope that I see them used in schools.

On the whole this has been a useful exercise in that it has introduced me to new aspects of ICT and if I do feel the need to creat a blog again in the future then I have the skills at my disposal.

It has been a pleasure.