Baby steps to success with digital natives...

My 3 year old is finally doing better, his appetite is back and he can breath pretty easily. Unfortunately, my 1.5 year old now has it. I had planned to post yesterday, but a toddler with pneumonia is not a fun time. I think we caught it sooner than his brother though, so hopefully it will not get as bad. Since I’ve been at home for the last three days focusing on my digital natives, I wanted to review some of Marc Prensky's work.

Prensky, M. (2005). Listen to the natives. Educational Leadership, 63(4), 8-13.

Prensky’s article ties in nicely with my suggestions of starting small in the classroom. Prensky’s discusses teaching strategies that can be successful with current students (digital natives); engagement before content, decision making encouraged, input from students about teaching process and the ability to be adaptive in the classroom. The ideas themselves are rooted in the student’s experiences with games and technology (I almost put “digital technology” but then I realized how much of a “digital immigrant” that made me sound).

Prensky makes the important point that we need to design our lessons to mirror the same type of goal orientated motivation, choice, immediate feedback, and “leveling up.” While I’m still not sure how to work “leveling up” into information literacy sessions (*cough* discussion point *cough*), I’ve been able to incorporate the other gaming strategies into traditional sessions with a high degree of success. Of course “success” is relevant and I’m still working to improve the sessions, but those “baby steps” I talked about last time work.