Discussion: New Media Use In Classroom

New Media Use in Your Classroom

Option 1 - New Media Use in Your Classroom 

Halverson writes, “As a result, education researchers interested in giving all youth opportunities to acquire and use new media literacies must understand the specific learning processes at work across these different media spaces” (p. 2353). For those of you who are currently teaching, or have taught in the past, in what ways have you allowed your students to use new media in your classrooms? Have they worked with a wiki, developed a blog, or created a screencast? Have they engaged in digital storytelling, as the author discusses? How did you approach this in the classroom setting? Was this considered a “fun” extra, or part of a mandatory assignment? How did you go about assessing this project? 

Discussion:

Today's classrooms unlike the past have become boundless. Its no longer about sitting in a four walled structure time and time again. The world is now a global village. The students we meet are tech savvy and as such educators need to up their game as far as technology is concerned. The web is full of new tools that educators can use and its up to us to find what media best suit the classes we teach. As Halverson writes, " digital literacy, specifically the production of new media, has become increasingly relevant and important form of participation in our 21st century society"(p.2353). The youth we interact with are so active on social media like Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, e.t.c and as educators we can tap into this to enhance learning. The use of YouTube to enhance learning is one area that I have utilized in the past and my students were able to create some media which can be accessed on url: Teaching Statistics at the school farm. As a class we decided to extend our learning of Mathematics to the school farm and the mere change of environment was exciting to them. As stated by Hull, G.A., & Nelson, M. E. (2005), "It is certainly the case that educators regularly rediscover the power that students experience when released to communicate and learn multimodally"(p.6).  This form of approach of letting the youth produce the media crates a sense of ownership and pride in them. As stated in Helverson article,  Jenkins et al(2007), describe "digital literacy as an engagement in participatory cultures where participation involves collaboration  problem solving resulting in new cultural forms that are put into public circulation"(p.2356). As teachers, giving the youth a platform to create digital media  is the best gift we can offer then in this 21st century. This class has enabled me know more web tools that I find useful in classroom like Vocaroo, Animoto, Flipgrid, online photo editor, online video editor, Screencast-O-matic, etc and these tools will definitely help me as I go about my classroom activities once I am back.

References:
Halverson, E.R.(2010). Film as identinty exploration: A multimodal analysis of youth produced films. Teachers Record 112(9), 2352 - 2378

Hull, G.A., & Nelson, M. E. (2005). Locating the semiotic power of multimodality. Written Communication, 22(2), 224 - 261