1.+Digital+Natives

**Social Media and th** ﻿ **e Influence on Children﻿**

__**Digitial Natives﻿ ﻿**__ What is a Digital Native? According to Marc Prensky, the founder of the term "Digital Natives", describes Digital Natives as "a person born after the general implemention of digital technology" (Wikipedia, 2010). Digital technology includes the following: computers, internet, MP3 players, cell phone, iPod, video games and digital cameras. Children of the digital native era are great at multitasking with their techonology. As the cartoon clip below shows, the child can log onto the schools website, download homework and print it within seconds, and that's only the half of it. Listening to their iPod, instant messaging (MSN or Facebook) and completing homework simultaneously is normal for the average Digtial Native. Digitial technology has become an integral part of how the Digital Natives learn, thereby changing their thinking patterns. Digital Natives require to have their information accessed immediately, for instance, when writing research papers children will mostly likely go onto the web first and skip going to the library all together. []

On the contrary is the Digitial Immigrants. Digital Immigrants are people born before digital technology even existed, and are those born in the latter 1970s and early 1980s. For the digital immigrants, myself included, digital technology requires a different way of learning that we are not accustomed to. There are various examples of the way digital immigrants have incorporated technology and still retain their past ways or accents. For example, when emails are sent calls will be made to know if the the email was received. Another example is printing out a computer document to edit the copy, instead of editing on the computer (Prensky, 2001). These examples prove the difference between how Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants view digitial technolgy. __**The importance of Digital Natives for Teachers**__ So how will Digital Immigrants teachers teach Digital Natives? First, there is no doubt it is difficult for the Digital Immigrants to learn the language of Digital Natives. Therefore, it is extremely important that the Digital Immigrants get aquainted with the new language in order that they can be somewhat on the same page as the Digital Natives. Second, Digital Immigrants can no longer assume that Digital Natives are the same type of learners as years ago. Therefore, educators have to change their approach in teaching by changing how topics in math, geograpy and other subjects are presented to their students. As much as Digital Immigrants would love to go back to the their types of methods, Digital Natives can not go back, as technology only keeps on advancing (Prensky, 2001).