Designing the Classroom Curriculum Designing the Classroom Curriculum | Page 152

Designing the Classroom Curriculum
Robinson’s ‘Changing Educational Paradigms’ 69 and Sugata Mitra’s ‘Build a School in the Cloud 70 which
expand on the idea of changing educational pedagogies (see web address in footer).
Digital Citizen
As teachers we need to be aware of the term ‘Digital Native’. This term, coined by Mark Prensky in his 2001
paper, “Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1”, refers to any student born after 1980 as someone who has
grown up surrounded by information-communication technology.
Prensky speculates that the abundance of technology has changed the modern students’ way of learning and
creates a need to change classroom pedagogy to accommodate this change.
Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new
technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames,
digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.
Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000
hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the
Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. Our students today are all
“native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet (Prensky, 2001)
Although now 14 years old, Prensky’s article offers a view worth considering. He has a number of distractors
who have argued the validity of his paper but he does present a valid argument regarding the changes
requiring inclusion of ICT into modern teaching. The “You can’t be my Teacher” You Tube Clip
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VSymMbMYHA) clearly illustrates the necessity of teachers
needing to use technology in their classroom, and what students expect.
Teachers need to be active Digital citizens, regardless of whether they are Digital Immigrants or Digital
Natives. For instance there are numerous occasions where ICTs can support the classroom curriculum:
administration, assessments, roll-keeping, student records, report-writing, lesson-planning and of course
helping to ‘teach’ a given subject. Thus it has become essential for a 21 st century teacher be a proficient user
of ICT. As with any skill the use of ICT is improved by both practice and use in situ.
The specific skills and knowledge required to make teachers computer literate remain undefined. An
approach that might facilitate agreement would be to accept the premise that "responsible curriculum
choice must always attend to what knowledge for whom and for what possible uses". (Davis, 1983)
Therefore, lifelong learning would be developed in the teacher by following Davis’ idea of matching the ICT
skills to the knowledge content and the pedagogical content used in the classroom.
Acknowledgment of this concept would admit the impossibility of defining computer literate skills
or knowledge for all teachers. Individual teachers need specific competencies to deal with specific
classroom situations. This directs teachers to specify their own computer literacy needs and to pursue
their own individual computer literacy education plans (ICLEPs). (Moursund, 1983 )
69
70
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms#
https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud?language=en
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