Being a teacher in the era of Digital Natives

Much has been said about the roles that teachers must fulfill in a classroom; nevertheless, nowadays the most important one undoubtedly is adaptability. The new generation of students demands teachers to be open-minded and to find new ways of teaching.

Unfortunately, Marc Prensky showed in his article "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants", that most teachers are what he names “Digital Immigrants", which implies having different perceptions of the teaching and learning processes.

These teachers were born when having a computer at home was very unusual and mobile phones, if existed, were only for phone calls. So, they are used to do one thing at a time, such as to read long texts and work silently, among other things, and this is the way they pretend XXI century students to learn.

But society and learners have changed and the idea of having a “magic recipe” for teachers is not available any more. As Prensky stated, "A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a "singularity" - an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back".

However, we think although "there is no going back", Digital Immigrants can use technology as a tool for teaching the new contents as well as the more traditional ones, applying these latter to their students' "new language", as the first picture illustrates. So, what it is required is an adaptation of teachers' methodology and selection of contents in order to fit this new era of students.

On the other hand, a weak point found in Prensky's article is the idea of age as the only factor in labeling a person as Digital Immigrant or Native. We think that, in our country, some other variables might be: access to basic services (such as electricity), family and neighbourhood environment, in other words, their socio - economic context. This particular situation sets a new chanllenge for teachers, and if we keep up to date not only taking courses but also bearing in mind society changes, the results will display long-term benefits for both Digital Immigrant and Digital Natives.

Finally, we have chose two pictures which we think illustrate very well both everything we have just written about, and reality itself.