Blog Journal 1- social native

As teachers these days, we are almost expected to orbit our curriculum around our students who orbit around technology. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. One thing that influences teachers and students to use technology in the classroom is just the overall outside world and the way we live now. The reality of it is, is that many workplaces are transitioning to become paperless and we can almost see this shift in the education community as well. The ISTE standards include empowered learner, digital citizen, knowledge constructor, innovative designer, computational thinker, creative communicator, and global collaborator. The one that I can resonate with most is being a creative thinker. This always helps to plan lessons and teach people using creative analogies or designs to keep students interacted. One of them I personally need to work on would be becoming a computational learner. Although it is easy to incorporate technology into my lessons, it is hard to fully indulge one's mind to be fully computational.

It seems as though if one were to know and practice all of the ITSE standards, that one could consider themselves a "digital native." However, that term holds a lot of meaning. The term digital native would mean specifically someone who was born and raised around technology. This generation doe snot know a world without tablets, laptops, and the ever-present iPhone. There is such a difference between the digital native and digital immigrant generations. For one, the attention spans of the digital native generation vary greatly with that of the digital immigrant generation. For us, it seems merely impossible to sit down and read a paper textbook or listen to a lecture while the instructor uses a chalk board the whole time. The main difference I have noticed is that the digital immigrant generation uses bare minimum technology such as powerpoint with nothing extra to provide a creative way of learning. In contrast to this, younger teachers utilize their technology more with creating easy to navigate websites. Things like this not only enhance the learning experience, but the studying and homework experience as well. From here, the technologies available to us will only increase and make life easier for students and it is important to be educated on all of the possible ways you can make you classroom an easy and positive environment for learning. Changing and adapting is never a bad thing- especially when tools to make our lives easier are at the tips of our fingers.