The question of whether students in 21st century
American classrooms are “digital natives” is a well-investigated question.
Huffington Post published an inaugural introductory article for the masses in
September 2012, “A Teacher’s Challenge: Empowering Today’s Digital Natives for
Tomorrow.” Before then, slightly more niche Internet voices were already taking
a position on the digital native debate; Campus Technology, for instance,
published their opinion (admittedly oriented more toward technology use among
college students) in “Will the Real Digital Native Please Stand Up?” And long,
long before that, academians were writing eloquent and highly specialized
essays, claiming the question had already become hackneyed (“Digital Natives,
Digital Immigrants,” Marc Prensky, NCB University Press). As it often the case,
it is this perspective from “the turn of the century” when people and
especially scholarly people become reflective and a delightful mix of nostalgic
and visionary that most informed my initial investigation into the technology
citizenship of my own students:
Today’s students – K through college – represent the first
generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire
lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players,
video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.
Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives
reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours
watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant
messaging are integral parts of their lives.
At first blush, it is always the sheer amount of time our
students spend with technology that elicits the most gasps, headshakes, and
brows furrowed in teacherly resolve that we must redeem the children, redeem
the media, and redeem ourselves. Ten thousand hours playing video games? We own
more or less 1100 hours of their lives per school year: by the time they
graduate, we will have exerted at least that much influence over them. Ah, but
what about when we added the twenty thousand hours of television? The truly
immeasurable tens of thousands of hours spent (as Marc Prensky wouldn’t have
yet known in 2011) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Imgur, YouTube,
etc. etc. etc.? The stalwart teacher blanches. We cannot amass more hours in
the classroom than hours in the digital world; it is a physical impossibility.
And so we about face. If books and whiteboards cannot win, then screens and
connectivity must be drafted into the cause. Educational technology became the
way, oddly and with an irony few notice, to win against all other forms of
technology. The greater pull recreational technology has on students, the more
fabulously educators swear allegiance to integrating technology in the
classroom. Since Marc Prensky penned (yes, we know he typed his essay, but for
ideological purposes let us imagine that he might have, out of habit from his
childhood, scribbled down the first notes of his treatise on paper with pen or
pencil) his inquiry into digital nativehood, educators have become more and not
less frightened at the prospect of technology in the classroom. PLCs and
department meetings at junior highs and high schools are preoccupied with the
learning, unlearning, and relearning of each new technology districts and
states prescribe (or suggest). Most recently, digital doc cams have been
replaced with iPad and Apple TV duos: and I do mean replaced. One fellow
teacher lamented two weeks ago when the bulb burnt out on her doc cam; the
expensive bulb would absolutely not be paid for by the school because it was
already outdated technology. The teacher mournfully began using the Apple
TV screen that had been installed in her classroom long before. Most students
prefer it, when queried, but my colleague regrets its existence every day.
And this is where the crux of my question lay. When I began
researching my students covertly through observation of what they said and did
in the classroom and openly by asking them questions they tentatively then
gustily replied to, I wanted to know what they thought of their own history
with technology. What do students—even, no, especially, the ones who
were only just born when Marc Prensky wrote his essay—think about their
technology use? What is their own perception of their experience of
technology? Most importantly, how does my students’ experience of technology at
school and at home differ?
What I heard from my students, and interestingly what I do
not hear from any Internet source, amateur or academic, is not that schools lag
in their use of technology; not that students use computers more at home than
at school and “why do I have to handwrite this at school”; not that teachers
are technologically inept compared with students (at least not most of them);
and not that students wish there were more technology at school (this was a
tricky question as every self-respecting teenager takes a lot of explaining to
understand that “more technology at school” does not mean free license to be on
Instagram all day for any and all purposes). What I heard from my students,
when I listened in between the lines, is “I have a smartphone but all I know
how to do on it is access a few social media sites. No one has ever explained
to me why we use an iPad in my English classroom instead of a whiteboard, and
honestly I kind of prefer the whiteboard. I’ve never written an essay on a
digital device at home in my life, and I like writing essays on the computers
in the library at school because it helps me feel less insecure that I don’t
really know how to write an essay. I’ve never been taught how to research
online, and I’ve never even been taught how to type with more than three
fingers so I have to write really slowly.” And most of all what I heard was, “We
can’t afford a computer at home anyway.”
What I learned from my students in the little cracks and
crevices between their words, where all their vulnerable confessions lay quiet
and still and maybe even a little ashamedly, was that they do not consider
themselves digital natives. They don’t even know what digital natives are
because adults invented that term. It is irrelevant to them whether they
are the first generation to own smartphones en masse before they have a
driver’s license. It is irrelevant to them whether their social studies teacher
using a doc cam or an Apple TV. It is irrelevant to them whether they do
assessments on a desktop or an iPad. Students, from what I learned in the last
several months of listening and watching, are far better barometers of what
they are actually learning—no matter the medium it comes through—than the
assessments and research we impose on them to further our own ideological pro-
or anti- or ambivalent-toward technology positions. My students, even though
they did not suspect it, were actually teaching me how to navigate the
turbulent currents of educational technology. My only guiding question as I
steer my classroom forward in the coming years will be, Does this technology
benefit my students more than anyone else concerned, and does it benefit them
more than the alternatives? My allegiance is not to what the Internet says
about what “young people these days” know or feel about technology. My
allegiance is not even (don’t tell anyone this secret) what my administration or
district tell me about what is good for my students. My allegiance is to what
my students tell me about their technology needs. This doesn’t mean that my
students will be let loose to play Angry Birds all day. It means that I will
work very hard to make a safe and wise environment in which students and myself
discover together what is truly helpful for their learning. Technology, when
you get right down to it, is only one factor in that commitment.
As a final reflection to these last ten weeks of learning, I
was prompted by what I saw in my students to think about my own technology
usage, both in my personal life and in the my classroom. If the students’
bottom-line was what they learn, my own bottom-line needs to be the same. I
have learned to think less pensively and more critically about how I teach and
how I facilitate learning. I have learned to cast my research net wide and to
throw out everything but the most succulent pieces of advice. I have learned to
begin a network so that I can support and be supported by other educators who
are grappling with the same questions and goals. I have learned how wonderfully
pitifully little I know about technology: I have learned, accordingly, that I
very much want to take a computer programming class, and a Microsoft office
class, and tons of other classes, not because these technologies will be
eternal in their relevance but because I will only respect myself as much I can
when I investigate the tools I use as extensively as I can. I have learned that
students are capable and knowledgeable peers as I and my colleagues determine
what our students’ classroom experiences will look like. And in my personal
life, I have learned that habit trumps all. If I habitually am afraid of
change, this will determine my attitude toward technological possibilities and
will plug my eyes and blind my eyes toward what might truly benefit my students
and myself. If I am habitually mourning the loss of journaling with pen and
paper in the park, and hunting for an armful of Dover thrift editions at the
local bookstore, and a brisk evening with a reading club at the local café
where the fireplace crackles with warmth and invention and yet I do nothing to
reclaim those things in my life, then I will automatically and always feel
resentment toward anything with a screen or a keypad or a web address. If I
habitually insist on characterizing myself as “old fashioned” and use that
adjective as an increase for being ornery and petulant, then I am not really
benefiting my students and am in fact creating an ever-growing gap between
their future and my past. I learned in the past weeks that it is good to be
reticent and argumentative and inept toward technology, and more than anything,
it’s good to take the first wavering steps toward changing myself, not just for
the sake of my students, but for my sake as well.
As Gertrude, after sipping her lemonade, might say,
"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters.
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Page ages page ages page ages.
Wiped Wiped wire wire.
Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream."
