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Digital Inmigrants are still alive

This is the fifth year I develop a blog for adults with an intermediate level of English and I still find students' resistance to use ICT resources as learning tools.

What make things even more disappointing is the fact that teachers are not very eager to use the blog either. This does not happen with teachers with ESL courses for kids.  I was worried about this bad predisposition and asked blog developers from other schools about their experiences and they told me they have the same problem.

Why do we have this problem with adults? I met Graham Stanley on chat and asked him for a piece of advice. He reminded me about the gap between digital inmigrants and natives. After Prenski's article "H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom", I thought this gap has disappeared but it has  not. Kids and teenagers can spend nearly the whole day in front of the PC because they do not use it only for doing school homework,  but also for having fun. so they enjoy working with computers and other tech gadgets mainly cellphones. Whereas adults use computers for work, so blogging or doing interactive activities may tire them. Adults will avoid screens and go back to books, pens and sheets of paper because that is their familiar way of leaning.

What shall I do? As regards students, I will be patient and try to present innovative activities in the blog. Activities which may call their attention because they are different from the ones they do in class. As regards teachers, I will give them ideas about how to use the web2.0 resources to engage students and try to go with them to the computer classroom to make them feel more confident. 

Any suggestions? Feel free to leave your suggestion in comments. Thank you :-)
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Comments

Susana Canelo said…
http://icyteas.com/?page_id=20
It shows another point of view. Interesting indeed.
Teachers sometimes are afraid because they're given the title of inmigrants. Maybe we can change that or just put that label in the right place.
5 May 2011 at 19:10
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