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
From videoconferencing around the globe to game-based learning, technology is finding a very comfortable fit in K-12 schools across the country. More schools are using computers as a tool to teach core curriculum and less to teach how to use computers, according to the fourth annual Teachers Talk Tech study, sponsored by CDW Government, Inc. In the survey, conducted by Quality Education Data, teachers noted that technology is changing the way they teach in dynamic ways. Nearly 70 percent of teachers said they relied on technology to teach critical-thinking skills, and 60 percent used it to teach scientific concepts. So it's no wonder that digital storytelling and more are catching on and taking off. These five ed-tech trends are on many administrators' radar screens and in use in a number of districts. "These have become trends because they've been tested out, work, and have an educational application," says Keith Krueger, CEO of CoSN, an ed-tech nonprofit that works with K-12 technology leaders. Read on to find out more about what they are, who's using them, and what makes them worth using in your schools.
1.Emergency Communication
In this post-9/11 world, when there's a crisis at a school, reaching parents quickly is critical. That's why more schools are choosing emergency notification services, using e-mail, text-messaging to cell phones, or recorded voice messages delivered to thousands of parents in minutes. Schools provide parents' contact data to the notification companies which store that data electronically, allowing administrators to access the data via the Internet to make changes and updates. If there's an emergency, administrators contact the company and, within minutes, parents are contacted by their mode of choice. When there isn't an emergency, administrators have found these systems ideal to remind parents of special events or even a truant student. "Mass notification creates a direct line of communication between the school and community," says Marc Ladin, vice president of marketing for the National Notification Network in Glendale, Calif. For the Metropolitan School District of Wayne (Ind.) Township, in Indianapolis, emergency notification systems have "been a significant enhancement to our emergency preparedness process," says Chuck Hibbert, coordinator of safety and transportation services at the 14,000-student district. "I think this will quickly become the norm for schools because it provides an ideal service to parents without hiring extra staff to do it."
Who's doing it
Several companies provide immediate emergency notifications to parents. Some include:
Digital storytelling is not new, but it is growing rapidly in schools across the country as more teachers understand how to use technology to help students in language arts and writing. It has taken off so quickly that at the 2006 conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education there were more than 30 sessions on digital storytelling. The previous year there was only one session on the subject. But, as experts explain, digital storytelling is more than slapping together music, images and a voice over. It is about using media to help students write and tell their own stories. The piece of writing becomes a recorded narrative, and images-mostly photography-are connected to that recording. "There's a sense of motivation and authorship that this tool provides to teachers and students," says Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling. A number of teachers use digital storytelling in their classrooms and some schools even use it as a mode of teaching. Scott County (Ky.) Schools went one further and created a digital storytelling center. The center, which opened in 2002, is a collaborative effort between the district and the county's public library. There are also nonprofit organizations, like the San Franciso-based Streetside Stories, working with schools on digital storytelling. Linda Johnson, executive director of Streetside Stories, has been using mobile labs to teach digital storytelling to inner-city students in the Bay Area for the past three years. "Students are so much more excited about writing and speaking and pulling together artifacts of their lives and experiencing it in a new way," she says.
