Taking a traditional activity and turning it to a 21st century Brain!

 It is so quick to label a student with ADD/ADHD in so many schools . On pg. 7, Prensky writes, "Is it that Digital Natives can't pay attention, or that they choose not to?"    This questions keeps spinning around in my head. Especially when he writes " Their attention spans are not short for games, for example, or for anything else that actually interest them ...... So it generally isn't that Digital Natives can't pay attention, it's that they choose not to." (pg.18)

When I read this, I thought back to the game that I constantly played when I came home from school. It was called "The Island of Dr. Brain," and it was in a floppy disk! I credit this game to teaching me problem solving skills and critical thinking skills. I coudn't learn these skills at schools because everything was lecture, and as an ELL student it was really hard to understand what my teacher wanted. But the lecture made us, fidgety, we were bored and could not sit still. We didn't have ADD, we were just bored and not motivated to learn the skill. The lectures and assingments that we once had to endure in our classrooms need to stop and be turned into a modern approach.

Take the traditional geometry lesson of learning angles and lines. We get a book, we open the page, and we look at the picture and label, right angle, obtuse angle, or acute angle. Identify and write perpendicular line, parallel line, or intersecting lines. Nowadays, if we try this lesson in our classroom, I think every single student in the classroom will develop a case of ADD, and will choose not to pay attention.

So let's take this lesson into the 21st centry brain, and have the students get into groups and provide each group with a camera. Have them go around the school and take snapshots of various angles and lines that they find around the school. Once that is finished, have the groups upload their pictures and showcase them into some sort of presentation for the class using flickr, power point, voice thread, etc. Have them play with these forms of media sharing beforehand and let them experiment with it. 

In Mark Bauerlein's introduction on pg: xiv he states, " One of the dangers of the Digital Age is that technology changes so rapidly that it clouds our memory of things as they existed but a few years past. ....... And if that's true, then the outlook we adopt now, even at the cutting edge of technology, may have little bearing upon ordinary experience ten years hence. So whatever it is that we teach, we need to make sure that we apply the use of technology as a problem solving approach. We need to be focusing on higher order thinking to make sure they know how to approach something that is unknown, because in reality we are preparing our kids on how to use pieces of technology that have not been invented yet.