Big Picture-Observation

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants is definitely an interesting topic. As I teach the basic Computer Literacy course I find that many younger students are definitely natives to the digital world. The older students are immigrants to the digital era. I find they are very weary of operating a computer let alone maneuvering around in the computer applications. The perception that they can ruin the computer with one wrong click is very prevalent. The younger generation tend to have little or no concern about using a computer or working with many different applications. It is like common knowledge among them.

I had a neat experience with participating in "I am going to college" day for 5th graders. All of the students knew how to use the computer and most of them knew how to use Microsoft Word. I was able to teach them how to draw a map and label it appropriately in 25 minutes. Where as I have taught students in their 30's to 40's who could barely operate the mouse and use the menus in an hour and 20 minutes.