December 1, 2024

From Natives to Immigrants: Creating Harmony in the Digital Age

We need to digest the fact that our students are ‘digital natives’. Their lives practically revolve around technology. Whether it is using the Internet to research for projects, social media to engage with friends, grammar and plagiarism checkers to check their work, or using voice commands to get answers to the most basic questions, their lives depend upon technology to the point of making them feel crippled when they do not have access to it. On the other end of the technology spectrum, stand the parents, caregivers, and educators of these students who struggle with basic tasks such as attaching documents to emails, understanding the meanings of the various emoticons, and ordering items from delivery apps and e-commerce websites. Although these ends are dichotomous, this is not a gap that cannot be bridged. Instead of finding reasons to dismiss technology completely or having a rigid attitude towards using it, the adults governing the lives of students must be willing to learn alternate ways of using technology, be flexible in their approach, and comprehend that technology will continue to have a profound impact on the students of today irrespective of other factors. Parental involvement in education will go a long way in closing the gap.

With the help of technology, the ever-changing needs of modern learners are being met at new-fangled levels. Coming specifically to the classroom, investing in technology is critical to enhancing the teaching-learning process and enriching the students’ experiences of acquiring knowledge. Digital technologies provide one more outlet for them to demonstrate their creativity and learning. Teachers can grapple with the ever-changing trends in technology and incorporate learning by:

• Allowing children to freely explore touch screens loaded with a wide variety of developmentally appropriate interactive media experiences that are well-designed and enhance feelings of success.
• Proffering opportunities for children to begin to explore and feel comfortable using ‘traditional’ mouse and keyboard computers to use websites, look up answers with a search engine, or find word meanings in an online dictionary.
• Capturing photos of the artwork that children have created; videotape dramatic plays to replay for children at a later date.
• Celebrating children’s accomplishments with digital media displayed on a digital projector or a classroom website.
• Incorporating assistive technologies such as text-to-speech or hearing assistance as appropriate for children with special needs and/or developmental delays.
• Recording children’s stories about their drawings or their play; make digital audio or video files to document their progress and share it with their parents or guardians.
• Exploring digital storytelling with students or attaching digital audio files with the child as the narrator to co-create digital books with photos of the children’s work

Some apps that can help educators and parents achieve this are: 

• Kahoot!: Kahoot is an app that is compatible with most devices. It has advanced game creation tools that help transform the classroom into a game show, thus saving precious time to source and curate learning games, formative assessments, and interactive timed quizzes. This app also tracks every student’s progress individually by providing a bar graph of student answers.
• edX: The edX app integrates lessons from different universities in the world. Teachers can easily stream and download videos to share in the classroom. This can be followed by a question-answer session to assess their learning capabilities.
• SeeSaw: With this app, students can store and share their best work with their parents. On the other hand, teachers can use it to enhance classroom learning by sharing concrete examples of their students’ learning powers by creating digital portfolios and knowing about their strengths and weaknesses in real-time.
• Duolingo: With this app, students can learn over 30 languages. They can use it in the classroom, at home, or on the go. Teachers can use it as a primary instructional tool to reinforce language lessons.
• Photomath: In this app, students can use their phone camera to take pictures of a math problem to get a step-by-step explanation of how to solve it. Teachers can use this app to improve the mathematical learning of students.
• IXL: This learning app provides educational instructions regarding reading, writing, and math problems. Besides, it records student progress, which helps teachers to differentiate instructions to deal with each student’s problems. It also assists teachers in improving classroom learning by providing them with thousands of questions to ask for each particular subject.

To those who are still unsure about using technology in elementary education, Dylan Arena, PhD, co-founder and chief learning scientist at Kidaptive, says, ‘Technology by itself will almost never change education.’ Further, Arena states that ‘The only way to change educational practices is to change the beliefs and values of teachers, administrators, parents, and other educational stakeholders – and that’s a cultural issue, not a technological one…It’s about processes and people rather than bits and bytes.’ Standing together, students and teachers can become engineers of collaboration, originators of learning experiences, and catalysts of change by using technology for mutual benefit.