Does your school have a strict “no phone use on school grounds”-rule when it comes to students’ mobile phones?

Luckily, my school hasn’t and so I can let my students check facts on Wikipedia, look up words and definitions during writing exercises and so on. What really surprised me was that only very few students abuse the freedom and start texting or updating their Facebook status.

I’m very lucky, it seems.

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I’ve always shunned the assumption that people who grew up with something that was introduced before they were born and is in widespread circulation when they grow up are inherently inclined to have superior knowledge about it. Like, you know, these “digital natives”.

From personal experience I can say that lots of my students are web-savvy. They have accounts at Facebook, SchülerVZ, MeinVZ, you name it. At the same time they have problems judging the validity of their Google search results. Additionally, they have trouble finding the correct expressions to feed into Google to actually get meaningful results.

But this is not all. A lot of their peers have trouble using a computer, connecting to and/or using the web with a web browser. Can we call these students “digital natives”? I think not. What is most interesting to me is that research has apparently come to the same conclusion by now.

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