Anyone who has ever taught a Year 6 computing class will give a wry smile when it's suggested that children these days are digital natives. At some stage, teaching this age group, these things will happen:
- You will find a studious pupil beavering away and saving their work to someone else's profile, blissfully unaware that they need to log on to their own to have any chance of finding their stuff again.
- A pupil will forget their login password.
- A pupil will forget their username.
- A pupil will forget their username and password.
- A pupil will try to reset their username and password but have forgotten that the e-mail account they gave at the outset was their mum's. When they do remember this it will dawn on them that they don't know the login.
- A pupil will disclose that they've never checked their e-mail, ever. Unsurprisingly they don't know their login or their password.
- You will peer over a shoulder to find a pupil getting text centralized using the space bar.
- You will peer over a shoulder to find a pupil working on an untitled document buried on the local drive of a classroom you never normally use.
And all of these things will happen before you've even really done anything of significant import...!
Digital natives don't exist.