Digital natives or digital immigrants?

We strongly believe, as we were born in the 90’s, that we are digital natives.  We belong to the generation in which computers were used to do practical works and internet was used to look for information for different subjects. 

We agree with Marc Prensky (2001) when he mentions in his article that learners nowadays think and process information differently from their predecessors, as they have different access to information, their thinking patterns have changed. For example, our primary or secondary school teachers did not have the opportunity to take advantage of the internet when studying. It is also true that in the future we will be digital immigrants because as years go by, there are technological advances too and we will have to adapt our teaching to the digital native learners.

On the other hand, we do not agree with Prensky (2001) when he says that digital immigrants have little appreciation for these new skills, because digital immigrants teachers are more aware of the digital native students they have in their classroom, so they can see the need to keep up-to-date with the new technologies to make their classes more interesting and adequate to the student’s needs.

We think that it is our job as teachers to make students feel engage with the class  and adapt our language and tasks to the “new” students to succeed in our classrooms and also bear in mind the context in which we are working to integrate all our students.

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