I spend nearly six hours each day consuming and creating social media content, including posts like this one. Each afternoon, I devote at least an hour to an augmented reality game that blends the virtual and physical worlds during my daily power walk. If you checked my bank statements, you’d see weekly expenditures of $10-$20 on digital items that outfit and enhance my avatars. Although I willingly inhabit both physical and virtual realities, I’ve never been able to articulate what this means for me or for the people I engage with in each space. I often worry that this bridged reality has changed the very nature of my worldview and transferred behaviors from one realm to the other, showing the importance of adapting classrooms for "digital natives."

Now consider the challenge for educators guiding a generation that includes millions who instinctively navigate a world where the digital and physical are indistinguishable. The bridge I carefully tread is unnecessary for these learners; they simply live in a single, fused world.

Before we proceed I need to provide clarity about my use of the terms “digital” and “virtual,” which I use interchangeably even though there is a distinction, important to consider when adapting classrooms: “Digital reality refers to the broad spectrum of computer-mediated environments, including all digital representations and interactions, while virtual reality specifically describes immersive, computer-generated simulations that replace the user’s real-world environment with a fully artificial one.”

My first insight comes from a New York Times interview where columnist Ezra Klein speaks with economist Kyla Scanlon, who publishes a Substack called Kyla’s Newsletter. In the Times article, Scanlon describes the lived experience of Gen Z, who are best understood via a three-part typology derived from the work of Rachel Janfaza. She labels the group we are teaching now as “Gen Z 2.0” and describes them in the following way: “Gen Z 2.0 is the people who are in college and high school now. They’re the first part of that generation that is entirely digital. For them, digital seems to be an extension of reality.”

Learners in this group clearly are an evolved form of the “digital natives” first noted by Marc Prensky in a famous 2001 article. Prensky described digital natives as having grown up with the Web, computers, video games, and other digital devices. Prensky argued that they think and process information differently from people who didn’t grow up surrounded by such technology.

Read the full article about adapting classrooms for the digital age by David Ross at Getting Smart.