Marck Prensky Digital Natives & Digital Immigrants

Marc Prensky opens his Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001) by stating that the
problem with education today is that our students have changed radically. Also, he holds that
todays students think and process information fundamentally differently from their
predecessors. Prensky call this new generation of high technology Digital Natives, holding that
our students today are all native speakers of the Digital language of computers, videogames and
the internet.
On the other hand, people who are not digital natives are called digital immigrants.
Immigrants, who were born in a time when technology was not readily available to use at all
times and have had to learn overtime how to use it. As compared to now, when the use of
technology is readily available to the children born, the natives.

Prensky states that students in our classroom are much more different than people who
are in front of the classroom teaching in terms of how they learn and the ways in which they are
able to take the information.
Marck Prensky Digital Natives & Digital Immigrants
Another main point that Marc Prensky makes is that there need to be a switch in the way
in which educators teach because students are losing out due to the old fashioned methods of
teaching which are still being used today by many teachers. For example, many teachers
primarily use the text as their mode of instruction and the natives get bored as a result they are
not learning the lesson to their full extent.
One final point that Prensky makes is that digital immigrant teachers are able to reach
digital native students with some work and effort.

In short, if digital educators really want to react Digital Natives they could do it and they
will have success in their classroom because there are many advantages to change to Digital
Native methodology. So, it depends of us if we want to continue with the same traditional
method that most teachers use nowadays but dont forget that todays learners are different and
they have different needs and we as teachers need to change the traditional way of teaching and
use this new methodology in our lesson plans. In the way that we are willing to change our old
fashion way of teaching in the same way we will see better result. It is worth to change for being
better teachers, if we love our profession we must be willing to change to this new Digital Native
world.