Slice of Life: My daughter, the digital native

"Can I do the Slice of Life story contest, too?" my seven year old daughter asked. After getting her squared away with a notebook and a pencil, I got back to the ominous task of clearing off my desk at the back of my classroom. Within a few minutes she had written a "slice" from her day, a brief piece about joining me at school for the afternoon. More questions followed, about my students' writings and about my own.

"I'm going to post my daily Slice of Life writings to my blog," I told her.

"Can I have a blog?" she quickly asked, with excitement that I didn't want to squelch with a "someday" answer.

After a few minutes of brainstorming possibilities (our family's Google Apps site? Blogger?), checking out the age limitations on Blogger (one needs to be at least 13 years old), we settled on using my Blogger account to create a blog for her. It was an option that I felt good about, knowing that I could maintain a little "parental control" on the behind-the-scenes functions.

She named her blog and picked out a template and got to work. "Should I capitalize all of the words in my title? Do I type in this big box?" she wondered, and then she was off. Ten minutes later, her first Slice of Life writing was posted and she was on the way to being a blogger.

Later on, she had physically moved on to other tasks about my classroom, but her mind was still working on the new found wonder of blogging. It was this final question that reminded me of the stark contrast between her life as a digital native and mine as a digital immigrant. "Will they have computers at the retreat next weekend?"

"No," I explained, wondering where the question was going. "The church retreat is at a camp in the woods. Why?"

"I was just wondering how I was going to write my Slice of Life writing on my blog while we are there."

Now that is certainly not something that I ever wondered when I was seven.