K12 Schools Must Fill Need For Digital Media Skills
There is a new urgency to teach digital media literacy as a study finds students are taking online information for granted
Using multimedia and other resources to bring books to life and get pupils in any grade excited about reading isn't a new concept. For years, English and language arts teachers have turned to outside sources to add another dimension to their instruction, from using historical footage to teach students about the Holocaust prior to their reading The Diary of Anne Frank to analyzing the lyrics of modern songs to find examples of metaphors and literary allusions.
What has changed over time is the method of sharing these resources with the students: Record albums and filmstrips gave way to cassette and VCR tapes, which have been replaced by CDs and DVDs.
Recently, many of those resources have taken on a virtual form. Teachers and students can use technology to access video clips of the Great Depression at the beginning of a unit on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, track down audio snippets of poets reading their works, or engage in an online chat or a virtual conference with an author. Even real time Web seminars, sometimes hosted by companies, are used in classrooms.
Resources in their virtual form are more accessible. Virtual author visits are less cost prohibitive than onsite appearances, since they lack the travel expenses and speaking fees. Even though such resources in their virtual form are more accessible to educators, they're essentially useless if schools lack the necessary technology to bring those materials into the classroom. But there are signs the digital divide is getting more narrow.
In 2005, 94 percent of public school rooms had Internet access, 97 percent of which used broadband connections, according to "Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994- 2005," a November 2006 National Center for Educational Statistics report. Plus, the ratio of public school students to an instructional computer with Internet access has improved from 12 in 1998 to nearly 4 in 2005.
"It will only be a happy marriage if those charged with education remain clear on what they want to achieve for our children and vigilant that the technology serves these ends."-Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
But while teachers have unprecedented access to technology in the schools, it often sits unused. Although 79 percent of teachers reported that they use technology as a teaching tool for students in CDW-G's Teachers Talk Tech 2006 survey, only 66 percent indicated they integrate it into their instruction at least two times each week, with a mere 37 percent using it daily.
Here is a peek at how to integrate technology into literature instruction that reveals why it's a best practice and provides examples of classroom applications, the necessary hardware and software, and the style of professional development that will lead to the maximum educator buy-in.
Reaching Every Learner
Since students learn differently, teachers have long known to vary their instruction to appeal to individual learning styles. For instance, left-brain thinkers tend to process information from part to whole, taking details and arranging them in a logical order to draw conclusions. Right-brain thinkers typically process information from whole to art, starting with the big picture before focusing on the details, and they tend to need a hands-on approach, such as seeing their vocabulary words in context, to understand the lesson.
In 1983, Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, took this concept to the next level when he introduced his multiple intelligences theory, which asserts that human beings have at least eight forms of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily- kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Although traditional classroom instruction caters to students with strong linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences, Gardner believes that educators should tap into the other six intelligences to reach every learner. When Gardner introduced his theory, educators' access to multimedia tools was far more limited than it is today.
"It makes a connection to the story that the kids wouldn't have without it."-Chris Crutcher, young adult novelist
Over the past quarter of a century, however, countless newspaper clippings, historical photographs, video footage and radio interviews have been preserved in a digital form and made available to people on the Web. Some of the resources are available through fee-based searchable databases, such as author interviews on TeachingBooks.net or streaming video clips on Discovery Education's unitedstreaming.com. Others are offered free through public-access sites, such as audio clips of poets reading their work found on Poets.org or the multidisciplinary online educator resources available through Thinkfinity.com. "The new technologies make the materials vivid, easy to access, and fun to use, and they readily address the multiple ways of knowing that humans possess," Gardner stated in "Can Technology Exploit Our Many Ways of Knowing?" published in The Digital Classroom: How Technology Is Changing the Way We Teach and Learn (Harvard Education Letter, 2000). "Moreover, for the first time ever, it is possible for teachers and other experts to examine the work efficiently, at long distances, and to provide quick feedback in forms that are relevant to students. Clearly, a marriage of education and technology could be consummated. But it will only be a happy marriage if those charged with education remain clear on what they want to achieve for our children and vigilant that the technology serves these ends." In other words, technology must remain a tool in the classroom.
