Blog Journal 1- The ISTE standards and Digital Natives.

Technology in classrooms is something so important in today’s world, especially in the classroom. Teachers are influenced to use technology because it has so many opportunities to simply help with teaching. Technology can be used with online assignments in order to have automatic, effortless grading. Teachers can use various online programs for things like attendance or asking the class questions, for example with Kahoot. Students are influenced to use technology in the classroom for many things, such as staying organized or communicating with teacher. It makes it easy to just shoot a teacher an email outside of class, rather than have to wait until the next week before asking the question in person.  Students and teachers also have many chances for technology outside of the classroom, for example in their personal learning network, in order to engage with people of similar interest, and maybe learning the same type of material. Within different personal learning networks like Twitter, students and teachers can tweet about their class, and hear what others have to say.

The ISTE promotes the use of technology in education, and sets standards for how technology can be used in education. They have standards for five constituents: students, teachers, technology coaches, computer science educators, and educational leaders. The standards that is most important to me is the standards on students, because I currently am a student. The standard states that students should be an empowered learner, a global collaborator,a  creative communicator, a computational thinker, an innovative designer, a knowledge constructor, and a digital citizen. According to ISTE, not only should students use technology, but they should offer so much more and benefit in so many ways from the technology. It offers many more standards for students to live up to and encourages them to be actively engaged and construct their own material.

The label digital native refers to those who were born into the world with technology preceding them. I completely agree with the term for digital native for today’s youth. They will never have to try to learn the basic things with technology that their grandparents did, because they will just grow up knowing how to do it. For example, when my cousin was two, she knew how to unlock a phone and go the games. It was instinct for her, and by the time she is 20, so many other aspects of technology, like how to run a computer will also be instinct.Digital natives still have to learn, but they do not have to try as hard because they have always done it. I have definitely seen a difference between how I, a digital native, and my teachers, digital immigrants, use technology. It has made an impact on my education when I would be in class and they would ask how to do something simple, like turn the sound on the computer. A student who would be a digital native, would have no problem figuring it out. Another way it has affected my education, is certain teachers will not use any online resources, like Edmodo because they do not how to work it. In turn, we would get all information directly from the teacher. I believe when I am a teacher, my students will be onto the next big thing, and I will still be using google drive. I am sure they will know how to use the latest computers, or whatever we have, and I will run into many issues with it.

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