Episode 54: Homeschooling Digital Natives

Most of you are digital immigrants homeschooling digital natives.

In 2001 Mark Prensky coined the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants". 'Digital Native' is used to describe someone born in the digital era. 'Digital Immigrant' is used to describe someone born before the digital era.

This comic created by Adam Ellis shows how digital immigrants can have a skewed view of digital natives.

As digital immigrants, we tend to divide our activities between "online" and "offline" whereas for digital natives the online world is just part of their reality - not something separate.

How does this affect you as a homeschool parent?

1. Literacy must now include Digital Literacy
You need to cover topics like fake news, digital communication skills, digital footprints, online research, copyright, and plagiarism with your children.

2. Tools you teach your children to operate must include digital tools
It's not enough that your children know how to use a knife, a pair of scissors, the vacuum cleaner, and the microwave. Now they need to know how to create digital graphics, share a document with others, produce videos and make websites.

Listening to this podcast (check out past episodes too) will help you learn how to teach your children many of these skills. In addition, take a look at our sponsor, FundaFunda Academy's Computer Applications class which teaches 7th - 12th graders both digital literacy and how to use many digital tools.

3. Teaching Reading, Writing and Math, is not enough
You need to add coding as a basic literacy skill as it will be necessary to understand it, if not use it, in most jobs in the future. Some of our previous episodes cover this topic:

* Episode 11- How to Introduce your Kids to Programming

* Episode 37- Programming with Scratch

* Episode 43– Unplugged Coding

4. Safety must now include online safety
We all know we need to teach our children how to be safe as they move about our physical neighborhoods. But we must also make sure to address online "stranger danger", how to create strong passwords, and how to identify phishing scams.

5. Mental and Emotional Health as relates to online interactions must be addressed
This means teaching your children not to be a cyberbully and how to deal with cyberbullies. It also means teaching our children not just about alcohol and drug addiction but also about tech addiction. And it means you and your spouse need to think through how much screentime your children should be allowed.

Subscribe to the podcast as we will be covering most of these topics in future episodes.

And be sure to join our Facebook group where we can talk about this together.