How to teach with technology: keeping both
teachers and students comfortable in an era
of exponential change
Marc Prensky
Some have opined that earlier technologies that were initially touted with great fanfare for their potential
to changing education, such as television, didn’t change much at all. I submit that all these technologies
– especially television – did change education radically. Just not in our schools.
The twenty-first century will be characterised by
enormous, exponential technological change. Our so-
called ‘Digital Native’ generation (that is, our students)
is already embracing these changes, creating in the
process an ‘emerging online digital life’ that I have written
about extensively.1
For education, this explosion of technological change
has enormous implications, and is already raising several
issues. Technologies such as mobile phones and digital
cameras are being banned by many schools. Schools
are moving towards one-to-one computing at radically
different speeds. In general, students are learning,
adopting, and using technology at a much more rapid
pace than their teachers, and many teachers are highly
fearful of the technologies that the students take for
granted. While some teachers do embrace the kids’
technological world, those teachers who are fearful of
being unable to engage a generation of students used to
technological advances often attribute their own failures,
such as the loss of control implied in integrating tools
that they know relatively little about, to untruths such as
lack of attention span and Attention Deficit Disorder on
the part of students.
In exchange, students observe their teachers’ lack of
fluency with modern tools, and view them as ‘illiterate’
in the very domain the kids know they will need for their
future – technology. The very concept of an ‘education’ is
changing for many kids, as they experience self-directed
learning, mostly out of school, about things that interest
them, and they see how different this kind of learning i