Digital Natives and Classrooms for the 21st Century

“Real Change”today is driven by technology and innovation

Sid Shugarmansid.shugarman@epsb.ca

Generational Differences

• Self identify• Baby boomer (50ish-65ish)• Gen X (30ish-49ish)• Gen Y (15ish-29ish)• Millennial

How do you like to learn?????????

Commonalities?

Rip Van Winkle awakens in the year 2007 after a 100 year snooze and is utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls, every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906, only now the blackboards are green.”

Digital Natives

Ian Jukes

Mark Prensky: “Digital Natives.”

Today’s CollegeGraduate

spent 10 000 hours playing video games

Spent 20 000 hours watching TV

sent and received 250 000 emails

Has seen 500 000 commercials

Spent 20 000 hours on the phone

spent countless hours listening to music, surfing the web and instant messaging

Spent 15-20 000 hours in school

Spent 5-10 000 hours reading*

In 2004 more than 2 million American kids had their own websites

Lives in a Universe with more than: 1 000 TV stations, 10 000 radio stations, 8 billion plus page Internet

Visual cortex ~30% larger/mature ~3.5 years earlier

Drop out StatsApril 3, 2008

A report released Tuesday by an educational advocacy group founded by retired general and former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell finds that almost half of all public high school students in the US’ fifty largest cities fail to graduate.

The report states that only 52 percent of public high school students in these cities graduate after four years, while the national average is 70 percent.

Some 1.2 million public high school students drop out every year, according to researchers. (a city the size of Greater Edmonton)

The findings are based on federal Department of Education statistics for the 2003-2004 school year.

The most current data we have is for 2005-2006. The 2006-2007 data will

not be released until May of this coming year.

• % of student who complete high school in three years – 63.5%

• % of student who complete high school in four years – 70.1

• % of student who complete high school in five years – 72.7%

We lose

~30%

of the kids that enter high school.

Dr? Lawyer? Delivery Person?

Better Thinkers, Deeper Thinkers, Creative Thinkers, Critical Thinkers…

Suitable environments from Jensen (Where we teach)