Me, "Daddy didn't answer his cell phone, kids. I am not sure when he'll be home but we can go to the pool once he is here."
Audrey, "Why don't you e-mail or ping him?"
Ping.
My seven year old just used the term "ping"- and correctly. When I was seven, the word "ping" only came before "pong." And if Daddy didn't answer the phone at work, too bad. There was no backup plan for making contact. But here is my seven year old armed with all sorts of digital stalking techniques for finding her father.
Truth be told, she comes about it honestly. My husband, Wayne, and I have always meandered the fine line between technology nerds and technology hoarders. An informal inventory of the apparati in the house includes our eldest, a desktop that was purchased over five years ago that is used pretty much as a footrest (the CPU). We have four laptops, four smartphones, two iPads, a tablet, and a partridge in a pear tree- all less than two years old. Our attic houses a disturbing graveyard of R.I.P. technology that ranges from cell phones the size of a small loaf of bread to laptops that weight about as much as my youngest child. The heap of cords and chargers itself is just shy of the area requirements to become its own zipcode. We hold onto them for reasons unknown- some uncomfortable feeling that if we get rid of it, the world will suddenly tailspin back to 1995 and we will be caught without our DVD/VCR combo machine.
But the world is not moving backward and as much as Wayne, and I throw ourselves into new devices and contraptions, we will never operate with the level of ease that our children do. My five year old son was watching Wayne undress his technology from his person and as he dropped the computer bag to the floor and unlatched the work and personal phones, my son thought nothing of grabbing the iPad, flipping it on, and reading a Tumblebook.
I remember the first time we let him use the iPad and I tried to give him a tutorial of my expertise (I had owned it for less than 24 hours). Wyatt squirmed away from me grumbling something about, "Geesh. Just let me use it." I was afraid he would be frustrated and perhaps take it out on the device, so I stuck close by to watch for any signs of ire. We had a few apps on there for the kids, but I had not even had a chance to show him which ones so I was fairly confident I would be beckoned back to resume my lesson. Instead, he tapped, pinched, explored, tried, swiped, and rotated his way into a functional understanding of how to play Angry Birds. He even found the volume button, which I had not even thought to look for at that point (the grunty and chirpy noises from the game definitely caught me by surprise!). I am fairly certain he does not remember life without the iPad. He learned how to use the computer before he learned how to ride a bicycle, or even write.
I realized even in my classroom, where I was trying every tool possible to flip my classroom using My Big Campus, I was not the expert. If I ran into a roadblock, I needed to ask an expert; a digital native. And now I have two of my own digital natives to show me the ropes at home. Of course they run, take martial arts, and are avid swimmers- but their lives are infused with technology in just about every aspect I can think of. Their school system uses My Big Campus to teach them skills like organizing files digitally, cyber-safety, and good digital citizenship that may not be second nature. As for the will and desire to use technology to expand their world, that is hard-wired into them. They are truly digital natives.
No comments:
Post a Comment