Raising a Digital Native in Argentina (by Jennifer Verschoor)

All parents have to make a very difficult decision when they have to decide which school they are going to send their children to. In my case I decided to send my 4 year old daughter to a regular school in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The school was not bilingual but had English as a compulsory subject.

I have been speaking in English to my daughter since she was born. She understands the language and feels very confident. Children at school even thought she came from “Disnelyland” because she was fluent in English.

As a Web 2.0 fan I felt that something was missing in my daughter’s education. She had to be able to learn the language as a game. Therefore I created her first blog when she was only 4 years old: Vicky’s Learning English.  It was just unbelievable to see how she naturally incorporated the mouse and learned very quickly how to go to favourites and open the link to her blog.

Amazingly she taught me that she was able to navigate when she was only 4 years old because she knew all the YouTube videos linked to the one I uploaded in her blog.

How did I add the content to the blog? This was really very easy because I followed her teacher’s syllabus and added funny activities for her to play at home. Her blog became a finalist earlier this year in III Espiral Edublogs 09. You can read about it here.

You must be asking yourself how she was able to use her blog if she couldn’t  read nor write. She knew that there was a clickable orange link that took her to a webpage. Some webpages were in Chinese and she was really engaged because for her everything was unreadable.

She was learning and having fun at the same time. This experience has allowed me to start the most rewarding professional experience I have ever had. Nowadays in a very small school in the Northern Area of Buenos Aires I am in charge of the Kinder blog: St. Matthew’s College. This blog offers extra activities for kindergarden students.

Digital natives take technology for granted. Do you know of any other story on how teachers are engaging this new tech-savvy generation?

Jennifer  Verschoor holds degrees as English University Professor, Bachelor in Educational Management, English Public Translator and ICT in the Classroom validated by Trinity College London. Her emphasis in training teachers to integrate technology into the classroom started several years ago. Since then has given numerous workshops on the integration of New Technologies in Education. Currently she is an ICT Teacher Trainer at ESSARP. She is proud WEBHEAD and President of ARCALL Argentine Computer Assisted Language Learning. For more information about her please visit her blog.