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.
