Just how thick is my (and their) accent?

After reading March Prensky’s article I would have labeled myself a Digital Native. In my wing, I’m the guy who many of the other teachers go to when they can’t open something online or they’re having difficulty with the online grading system. After reading Marc Prensky’s article, The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native and being a part of this class for the past month, I’ve been very humbled and have come to realize that my accent is much thicker than I thought and is much thicker than I would like it to be.

After comparing my life to that of what Prensky describes as a native I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not a native but I’m certainly not an immigrant
The areas into which I would label myself as a native are listed below.

Communication - I e-mail and text all the time, I check facebook daily but don’t spend a lot of time on it and I’ve most recently signed up for Twitter.
Learning- I look everything up on-line. Gardening tips, cooking tips, if there is anything I’m curious about I go to Google or Wikipedia.
Searching –As I mentioned above I use the internet daily to look for information.

The following things are where my accent starts to thicken.

Buy & Sell – It depends on what I’m buying. Part of me still feels the need to see the item in person if I’m going to buy it so if I’m looking for a big ticket item I’ll go to the store and get it there. But things like theatre tickets, books, things that I’m 100% sure that I know what I’m looking for, I’ll buy on-line.
Meeting – Almost all of my dates in high school were people that I met on-line. This was ten to fifteen years ago and I’m gay and was the only person who was out in my high school so my choices were limited. My partner and I have been together for ten years so I haven’t had a reason to be on a personals page in quite some time. Looking back I remember thinking that it really wasn’t that big of a deal and nowadays it’s perfectly normal for people to meet from a dating site.
Coordinating – I use e-vite every once in a while and I’ve yet to ever create an invitation on facebook. I’ll need to do that sometime soon.
Evolving- I can text without looking but I’m not comfortable with it and I certainly can’t do it in my pocket.

I wouldn’t say I have an accent for the rest…I’d say I don’t speak the language.

Exchange – Create – Collecting - Coordinating – Evaluate – Games -Analyzing No, Reporting – Programming –

With the exception of this class, I don’t blog, I’ve never created anything and posted it to YouTube, I still play my Nintendo 64 (I’ll have to skip over game cube and go straight for the wii) I never give feedback when I buy things from Amazon.com or e-bay and after reading the article I feel guilty about it so I’ll be doing that in the future.

Just the other day I asked them to save their final projects on a playlist on iTunes and save it to the playlist. Over half of them didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought maybe I was unclear so I repeated. “All you need to do is create a playlist and drag it from the music library to your playlist” They didn’t know what I was saying. I was shocked...at two things....1) They weren't the digital natives I thought they were going to be and 2) My own ignorance in just assuming that because they were kids that they would all be technical wizards.

Clearly what I need to do is take inventory. I would have assumed that they would all be digital natives but I’m learning that this is not the case. Based on the some of the ideas presented in the Prensky I’m thinking I should create a little survey create a survey and give it to my students to see how much of a native they truly are.

Knowing who they are as digital natives or imigrants and what they do would seem to be the first logical step in attempting to create an environment that reflects who they are and what they do.