First Generation Digital Native

Since I am relatively young and graduated college recently, I feel that I am strongly connected to media natives. I grew up with a cell phone, although not a smart phone, and I was a part of the shift from myspace to facebook. Therefore, I consider myself as a first generation media native. I was a participant in the shift of media use instead of access and thus have a firm grasp on many current tools and websites.

In this sense, I feel I have many digital native qualities but not all of them. I am CONNECTED; I obsessively check my email and facebook throughout the day on both my phone and my computer. I expect and practice RANDOM ACCESS. I switch back and forth between tabs constantly. I switch subjects of conversation rapidly and multitask in all situations. 

Since my district has shifted to 1:1 technology, I currently use a lot of online tools in my classroom to introduce students to appropriate technology use. For example, my students love to play kahoot, which is a quiz style game that students can play using computers or smart phones. We have practiced using music based kahoots and evolved into quizzes on literature.

I also use google classroom for many assignments now. Instead of making copies of an assignment and waiting at a copy machine ad nauseam, I post a google document of a task and have students submit them to me online. This reduces paper usage for producing assignments and submitting them.

In my after school program, my students created a video as a commercial for the the program. Here is the video they made: