Blog #4

According to the "Digital Natives" quiz, I am a digital immigrant because I could only correctly define 4 of the terms. However, once I read through the article and learned what the definitions of the terms actually meant, I realized that I was actually a digital native. Natives rely on technology on a daily basis and view it as their 'friend', where immigrants fear technology and try to avoid it at all costs. I think technology in the schools is such an important thing to introduce. I can remember playing Oregon Trail in Elementary School for social studies and Number Munchers for math- the computer lab was always that I looked forward to. It is evident that today's kids are much technologically savvy than most. Many of the students in my class constantly talk about their Nintendo DS or XBOX 360 at home. I've noticed that these students have a hard time being challenged and finding fun in school-based activities because they are constantly living in their own fantasy land after school. I thought the digital natives site was interesting because of the suggestions it gave to help these kids in the school.

To be completely honest, I am having a very hard time defining and understanding what exactly 'emergent digital literacy' is. I looked up the term online but fou nd very few results. I could be completely wrong, but I thought that digital literacy is how the students are using literacy through technology outside of school and emergent digital literacy involves students of other languages attempting to use a new of technology that's on a different level of what they are used to. In this case, emergent students often times do not have the resources that others outside of the classroom would have. Therefore these students are on a whole different level than the others because of the lack of exposure to the different forms of technology. For ELL students, these new concepts and ideas of technology could be very confusing as they are new and unique and something that is not commonly viewed at home. Gibbons states that ELL students are not as familiar with our basic concepts of print, therefore could potentially be left behind. It is hard to say with the ELL student in my classroom how she feels about all of this because she has severe learning disabilities ontop of her miscommunication with the rest of her peers. I feel so sorry for her because I could never imagine being in a room where I did not understand one word of what was being said. She is often left out because of this and I can tell that it affects her. Tompkin's view of emergent literacy and the term of emergent digital literacy are seemingly two of the same because both closely correlate to one another and will become one in the same with the way technology is developing through-out schools. As result, ELL students are suffering from their different backgrounds and new concepts to follow and keep up with the rest of the schooling system.