While critics draw important attention to worrisome aspects of digital cultures, they may be missing a much larger point about how young people live in a digital world, how they create and re-create themselves and their identities in ways that are remarkably foreign to others "digital immigrants". In this article, "digital immigrants" refers to someone born into a world "without computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age". The author stresses that despite the large amount of computers in schools, educators as a whole have not really begun to understand the literacies that students develop and demonstrate in their digital environments outside of school. With remarkable consistency, schools have made computers function just like pens and typewriters. Written language, and students' abilities to think in important ways with the material tools of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters, is the current prototype of literacy. Conventionally, being literate means being able and eager to read and to create a wide range of written materials. The author suggests that educators pose the following questions in terms of teaching kids in this digital age: (1) What is the material basis of digital literacy? That is, what is different in a digital age? and (2) What are kids doing already, and what could they be doing better and more responsibly if educators learned how to teach them differently?