Digital Denizens

As I read the “Digital Denizens” I discovered that I am a Digital native – A person in this category uses technology in executing a wide variety of tasks and readily adapts to changes in the tools that s/he uses. S/he may have grown up with technology or may have adopted technology as an adult. My dad works for a company that is purely based on technology and is always bringing the newest and coolest gadgets home and would always ask me to figure out how to use them. Technology has been a crucial part of my life. I see how technology is the new wave of education, just based on my classes this past year. Out of my 6 classes, 3 are based on technology and 1 technology was heavily integrated into the course. Whereas I look at my classes freshman year, and many of the teachers didn’t even use angel. The dramatic shift in technology is apparent in schools and in early education.

While reading Tompkins Literacy for the 21st Century, an emergent literacy is defined as “children’s early reading and writing development before conventional reading and writing” At the emergent stage children are at the beginning of their literacy journey. As emergent learners children “notice environmental print, show interest in books, pretend to read, use picture cures and predictable patterns, reread familiar books with predictable patterns, identify some letter names, recognize 5-20 familiar or high frequency words. Distinguish between writing and drawing, write letters and letter like forms or scribble, develop an understanding of directionality, show interest in writing, write their first and last names, write 5-20 familiar or high- frequency words, use sentence frames to write a sentence” (118). These are the developments of an emergent learner in reading and writing.

While children are emergent learners in literacy, we are emergent learners in technology. As we all began somewhere in technology whether it was from a young age or now, we are all still learning how to use technology to our advantage and to aid in our education. Our future students, and current students are a head step above us, since they are growing up with technology as part of their daily lives whereas we need to go about to learn and sometimes relearn what we know. This wave of education is important to notice and comprehend to help better our students education, because not only is technology there to enhance education but it also gives students who have a hard time in school a leg up in education. Technology in education and special education is reaching new heights and helping more students above and beyond. 

Technology is helping general education students, special education students and also English Language Learners. In Scaffolding language Scaffolding learning by Pauline Gibbons, discusses how ELL students learn. Technology can be comparable to another language that a student is learning. As an ELL student needs the assistance of learning by doing, so does a student or adult with technology. As we learn technology, we need to think about how difficult what we are learning in our own language (somewhat) and apply that to our teaching, especially with ELL students!