Digital natives and school

In my last article I wrote shortly about the theory of the digital natives. It is a theory which I think give us some insight of many of today’s children. In this article I will try to describe what digital natives are used to, how digital natives learn, and try to suggest some things which may be important for adjusting the school to them. I have tried to narrow it down to what I think is most important for the time being. For more about this topic I suggest reading Ian Jukes’ understanding digital kids.

As in the last post I have written most of the article in Google documents, and a short summary with a video in the blog post. By following this link, you may get to the second article in Google documents.

Here is short summary of the article:

• When planning the lessons or periods we should often let the digital natives use higher-order thinking skills like analyzing, evaluating and creating. They should often be given the opportunity to create content in school with digital media.
• Digital natives like instant feedback and rewards. A digital native would like to use digital media in their activities, and then comment and assess on their own and other’s products besides getting the assessment from their teachers. The assessment should be as soon as possible, and peer assessment like comments on their products would be great for that.
• They like to interact and cooperate both physically and digitally, and should often be given the opportunity to do this. They can cooperate in the same or different time and place.
• Digital natives like their learning to be relevant, fast-paced and fun. They prefer their learning to be “just in time”, when they need it. The learning could be non-linear as opposed to the linear learning methods of many classrooms today. They want random access to the information and less step-by-step-learning.

• When learning, more of the content should be based on graphics, pictures, sounds and videos.

You may read the whole article here: Digital natives and school

I would like to end this article by sharing a YouTube video. It is about children today and how they think, act and learn: