It is amazing to me that my little digital natives' brains are actually physically different neurologically. I listened to Sandy last Friday I thought, "How does this happen?" As I read Understanding Digital Kids by Ian Jukes and Ted McCain I came across an analogy that made sense to me. The authors compared the brain to a tree. They explained that "a tree grows extra branches, twigs and roots and the unused branches or pathways are pruned away. And it's this pruning that gives the tree its shape for the future." Next the article discussed myelin which are new neuronal connections which form during early childhood. This part of the article became a bit too technical for me. It makes sense to me that as a result of the constant digital experiences that children's brains are wired differently and I also believe they process the very same information we process, differently than we do.
I've noticed over the past two years that more of my students receive twos in listening. As I read the words, "Digital Natives think graphically" this began to make sense to me. Their eyes move differently than the eyes of Digital Immigrants when reading. It's very possible that many of my students read in an F-Pattern, ignoring the right side and bottom half of a page and only read content on the left side. Red or pink fonts draw their attention first, followed by neon green. Black is largely ignored. Yikes!
Now for the fact that blew me away. 87% of students according to this article, are NOT auditory or text-based learners. They think graphically which leads to the conclusion that they are visual or visual kinesthetic learners.
Digital learners prefer receiving information quickly, they thrive on multi-tasking and prefer processing pictures, sounds, color and video before text. The list goes on and on and poses quite a challenge to me. I did enjoy the line, "Teachers need to teach lazy." I believe this to be true in the sense that my role is of course to teach the basics, but as important, to empower my students to become independent thinkers and learners.
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I like your summary of the Jukes article. If you go to his website, he has a lot of the primary stuff he uses listed. The technicalities are hard to understand but at least someone does that dirty work for me. Just a thought but you might want to check on some of the NECC sessions which will be streamed; don't know if his will or not but there are lots of people like Will Richardson (who is working with that group that Gail and Mike and Buc are part of) will allow themselves to be streamed.
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