Digital Status

Am I a digital native, immigrant or alien? This is a pretty interesting question, one in which I think I fall in between native and immigrant. I’ve spent many hours playing video games, watching TV and movies, surfing the internet and so on, which makes me think I am pretty native to the language of technology. In fact 10,000 hours playing video games and 20,000 hours watching TV seems a little low to me. I do take a little pride in how much of video game/TV/movie nerd I am. But on the flip side I have worked with others, who far surpass me in my uses of technology. For example I have a few friends that have had their own blogs for years, while I have refused to create one for myself (not because I don’t know how to make one, but rather I think I have very few things that important enough to talk about and it seems like a lot of work!)

I have had a surprisingly large amount of technology use in the classroom. In high school both my parents worked at Hewlett Packard, and so I was fortunate to have a lot of technology at home, which I thought meant I was good with computers. I later found out that there were kids that had may more experience and drive to use technology. I learned this my sophomore year in high school when I enrolled in a computer technology class with my friend. It was a start-up program, and my class was one of the first classes to be involved in the program. We were given tasks such as building a computer, writing a web page in html, setting up a school webpage and setting up a school-wide network. I could not handle all the work and it far exceeded my capabilities so the next quarter I decided not to take the next computer technology class.

Able to avoid a lot of super technology through the rest of high school I was put right back on top of the techno world when I entered college. Not that I enrolled in any computer science classes or tech classes, but I was luck enough to be on a very wired campus during the height of programs like Napster and networking games like Counter Strike. Actually Western Washington bragged that they were the “most wired” campus, and I was there to be apart of it. The technology I had in college was awesome, but it mostly all used for NOT doing work. I remember downloading gads of music and burning CDs when I should have been studying. I remember the creation of Myspace and Facebook, and consequently dinking around on those two sites instead of writing papers. In the end I wasted a lot of time on technology, but it also provide some avenues of faster acquirement of facts and data, being able to get journal articles over the computer and much more educational purposes. It was my lack of judgment which led me to doing epically long internet quiz and surveys which had no educational uses.

Reading the article by Marc Prensky has changed my mind a little bit about technology as a teaching device. As a PE and Health teacher I originally couldn’t think of many ways my students could use technology in or for class, but the second article had a really cool example of how it could be apply to health. I thought you could only be physically healthy by doing physical activities, but with the results Click Health came up with I think I understand that playing certain video games can help kids with self-efficacy. This in turn can help them monitor things like self-health and what their bodies are doing. The technology is not replacing exercise, it is aiding it. Although I have been pretty anti-blogging, I do see the benefits of having a website or blog, where I can keep my class up-to-date about assignments or projects that are due. I can also see it as a good place to have other helpful websites where they can find more detailed information about subjects I wasn’t able to fully cover in class. In the end I understand tailoring my lesson plans around how my students learn is just one more way of reaching them. If I allow them to use their smart-phones to do some research, well then smart-phone it up!