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.