Digital Natives, Digital Imigrants: Do They Really Think Differently

     The article I read was from the chapter three section and discussed digital natives and how the students in today's society falls within this description.  What caught my attention about this article was the fact that they were going to look at home digital natives, or today's children, view learning and how their brains develop.  We have been talking about brain development in our other class with Dr. Bond and this just reemphasized what he has been saying about how what we do over a long period of time shapes our brain.  Therefore since we are growing up with kids who spend almost all their time using technology their brains might be constructed differently than teachers who have been around a while.  The point is that the teacher has two options: first they can ignore the fact that students learn best by using the very thing that they spend their time with, technology, secondly they can embrace this and use new forms of technology that will incorporate the interests of students.  This article talked about how teachers need to be looking into ways that they can incorporate educational games and media into all aspects of teaching.  One of the most interesting statistics that I saw in this article was that if you take out all of the lunches, recesses, and in between times in school that there is approximately 3 hours of instructional learning that takes place.  Their point in this was if you can incorporate technology in a way that is fun, such as through online educational games, that if students spend three hours in a course of a weekend also playing these games it is like they have gained another day of school.
     In chapter three of our book they discussed Teaching, Learning, and the Curriculum.  They looked at different statistics and findings showing how much time children spend outside of school using technology and then looked at how little was spent in school.  These do not seem to correlate at all and I think that this is what the article I read was referring to.  If children are going to embrace the technology and enjoy it than shouldn't school be a place to show them how to enjoy learning as well.  The number of schools that use technology standards is increasing, but as we have all seen in the schools we are in the usage of technology is still on a low scale.  It will be important for this generation of new teachers to take our knowledge of technology and the need we see for it into the classroom to further encourage the use of technology to everyone around us as well.