THE MILLENIALS
Does your child do his/her homework while listening to music, watching TV, IMing a friend, and talking on a cell phone- all at the same time? Your child is a millennial, a screenager, a digital native. Millennials are young people born between the years of 1980 and 2000 who have been raised in an environment saturated with digital and electronic media. The world they have grown up in has always had:
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Their world has always had voice mail, iPods and digital music downloads, and a Starbucks on almost every corner. They never saw the Challenger fly, don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors, and never saw a Howard Johnson's with 28 flavors of ice cream. Bill Gates has always been a billionaire and "whatever" has never been part of a question. Last year, in their world, digital cameras outsold film cameras, cell phones outsold land lines, and it is projected that cell phone cameras will outsell all cameras next year.
Digital kids are:
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We are: Parents and teachers are the "digital immigrants." No matter what our level of technology expertise, we did not grow up in the same world as our children. We may be excellent computer users or we may not even know how to cut the computer on but we have not lived our lives in the same environment they have. It's not a skill level as much as it is a mind set.
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Information taken from http://staffdev.henrico.k12.va.us/parents/millenials.htm