By Katie Lepi, Edudemic
Basically, all of our young digital natives are being taught by “digital immigrants”, or, folks who didn’t grow up with the internet. Pretty obvious, but think of it this way: Let’s say you go to school and have to take English classes (and English is your native language). Your teacher’s native language is not English (and let’s say hypothetically their English is not great), and even though he/she may be very knowledgeable about literature and much of the other stuff to go along with it, there’s a language barrier getting in the way. In some cases (and obviously not all), this is what we’re doing to our students. We are….older. Many teachers who are not ‘fluent’ in technology choose a pretty logical route – don’t teach with technology you’re not fluent with. But teaching only with a bit of technology that you feel super comfortable with is like teaching a foreign language class when you have a more limited vocabulary than the students. The handy infographic below came from a quick Google Search of “digital natives vs. digital immigrants”.
http://www.edudemic.com/digital-natives-digital-immigrants/
