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
How can children lead productive and satisfying lives in the 21st century if in school we are having them use technology from the 20th century? The hallmark of the 21st century global workplace is the computer. According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, "The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap between Internet-Savvy Students and Their Schools," students spend 27 hours a week online at home and an average of 15 minutes a week at school. Students are not using computers to any appreciable degree in school because district leaders are not providing computers to students to any appreciable degree.
While some schools have embarked on one-to-one laptop programs, it has become increasingly clear that scaling one-to-one laptop programs to all grades and sustaining such programs year after year is not something all district budgets are prepared to support. As documented in The New York Times in May 2007, some districts are terminating one-to-one laptop initiatives because the total cost of laptop ownership goes beyond what districts can afford.
Properties of a Mobile Device
However, a new category of computing devices called "mobile learning devices" is emerging that might well be the answer to schools' needs for a scalable and sustainable computing solution. Four properties define a mobile learning device:
Personal. If 30 children in a classroom needed to share three pencils, learning to write would be exceedingly more difficult. For a technology to be truly useful, each child must have his or her own. The cost of notebook-sized mobile computers such as Fourier's NOVA5000 or Intel's Classmate (about $500), or palm-sized mobile computers such as HP's 110 iPAQ and Asus's 626 ($250-$300) are more affordable.
Portable. Laptop computers, which can be six or seven pounds, are portable in the same sense that a brick is portable. Truly portable devices weigh less than three pounds, have five- to eight-hour batteries, and can take a beating. Like a cell phone, instant on/instant off is another important property of a truly mobile device; a learning device needs to be available in the blink of an eye-always ready to take a picture of a cricket in a fi eld, accept a beamed fi le from another student, or display a streamed video.
Multimodal. Mobile devices need to be able to handle media such as sound and video, and a broad range of representations such as text, spreadsheet, concept map, and animation. Indeed, manipulating multimodal data is even easier on a mobile device than it is on a desktop computer. For example, to make a podcast on a desktop requires plugging in a speaker and a microphone and hoping the system sees the devices. But the ability to record sounds or voices and take pictures and video is built right into mobile devices.
Constructive. Learning is not about watching or about delivering information. Children need to create, design, and build. A key component of a mobile device as a learning device is its ability to readily accept keyboard input. All children need to be able to read and to write text-and writing requires a keyboard these days.
Mobile Modifications Mobile devices need educational software to turn them into mobile learning environments. Here's an analogy: The textbook has been modified over the years to include features that address the unique needs of K12 education, such as incorporating questions at the end of chapters, providing answers to every other problem, and including a teacher's guide and tests. Similarly, a mobile learning environment is a mobile computer that has been "modified"-via software-to address the unique needs of K12 education. For example, a mobile learning environment needs software that enables teachers to create lessons, software that supports students as they engage in enacting those lessons, and software that supports teachers and students in managing the broad range of artifacts that are generated during lesson creation and enactment.
Teachers need ongoing professional development support to understand how to integrate such mobile computing devices into their classrooms. One reason cited for the failure of one-to-one laptop initiatives is the lack of professional development for teachers as they rework existing curricula and instructional practices to take advantage of what the mobile learning environment can offer. Teachers often wonder why they need to integrate technology since their lessons have been honed over years and already work effectively with their students.
