Advice for Digital Immigrants.

To the whom it may concern,

Human society has made more technological advances in the past 100 years than in the previous 2,000 years, so keeping up with the times can be, and has been an issue for many people. The advances in computers, the internet, and other revolutionary technologies in the past few decades alone has created a wide gap between the baby-booming generation to the next generation that people refer to as "digital immigrants vs. digital natives". In this digital age, the older generation that is used to performing many tasks, such as research, depend on doing work without the usage of some of the technologies that they may have at their disposal. Meanwhile, the younger digital native generation has been born into a lifestyle that is generally promoting everyone to depend on computers and other technological devices to help them make their lives as quick, simple, and efficient as possible.

As for digital immigrants who are struggling to keep up with the times, the main point they should realize about the digital natives is that they have grown to receive information as quickly as possible. The old way of teaching, teaching one thing at a time and constant lectures, are not entirely effective in teaching this digital native generation because these students are used to having a multi-task, parallel form of learning. Instead of teaching students through the course's text books, and only by reading the text books, the students of today will generally not be as efficient learners as they could be. This generation would be much better off if the teacher introduces more ways for their students to learn the content of the class, such as creating an online blog, much like this one, to discuss/debate a certain topic that really engages the student rather than having the students read the text book, listen to the teacher's lectures, and memorize the content for a test. Another way for teachers to reach out to the digital native students is by having them use computer programs that are based on the content of the class. There are so many other examples of how educators can reach out to the digital natives, but the main point is that much of the success of teaching these students depends on the teachers themselves. Even if the teacher is not a digital native, they still need to flexible and accept the new digital way of teaching otherwise the students will not be as interested in learning as they could be.