Learning to Think Like a Teenager

Here's a story that resonated with me:

This takes a particular willingness not to get it right all the time. Which brings me to teenagers. Two moments during this weekend really drove it home to me how absolutely second-nature using the Web increasingly is for kids. My nephew, sitting in a traffic jam on a Colorado highway, pulled out his cellphone and called his mother in Massachusetts, asked her to go online to see what was going on further up the road--she did, found out that snow had closed the pass, and relayed the info to her son, who turned around and headed back to Boulder. And then my daughter, lost in the impossible knot of Boston streets, called a friend in Vermont to do a Mapquest search to help her find her way to her destination. Now being kids, neither one thought of doing the research ahead of time, but being kids of today, they knew they could find an answer through their
cellphones and friends with computers.

I think we need to continually remind ourselves that technology is a natural part of our student's worlds - not an add on like it is for us old folks - the digital native (students) versus digitial immigrants (us) idea.