What’s The Deal With Critically Analysing Digital Media?
So, how Should Adolescents Critically Use Digital Media? Give kids laptops in school. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Make sure to like and subscribe… In all honesty though, to put it simply, that is a major step needed to allow for adolescents to critically use digital media. To break it down there are three main steps needed to be taken: put devices in the classroom, train the students and teachers on how to utilise them to best ability of the student, then have the student understand what digital media is; then and only then, can we as educators have students critically understand and in turn use digital media.
Obviously, there is a plethora of other steps needed to achieve the end goal at hand, however one of the major setbacks is actually having digital media in the classroom. In 2017 there was barely a 50% rate of teachers reporting 1:1 computing (EdTech, 2017) This was up by 10% from the year before, which is fantastic, and the first step needed. I mean, just think about it for a second. How can we teach students about digital literacy without a device, which is something too many people take for granted? Not every student has a device, family/ shared device, let alone their own. Alright, well why not use a phone or a cheap tablet? Well, some of these kids have an old hand me down that cant run the apps needed. To boot, sometimes no device is better than a low-end device. The slower device with a lot of limitations can be more of a hindrance than not having any device at all.
So, let’s say that we are in a middle to higher class neighbourhood and all the students have their own laptops, or we are in a low-middle class school district and they have a grant to have 1:1 devices, next step is understanding what device to have the students use. Is an iPad more advantageous than a Chromebook? Is it better to have every student with their own device with limitations or have class sets of more powerful laptops or even desktops? These are all legitimate questions that isn’t black and white, but more so something that each district, school, teacher needs to think about and have an equal voice in the conversation. Should a student be hindered from the possibility of learning higher level digital media, such as adobe. There have been students, in the aforementioned article, that mentions how traditional notebooks work well for older students, where tablets are better for younger K-3 students, since laptops can be too much for them.
So that’s two main hurdles concurred; getting devices and figuring out the device. Since we are focusing on adolescents lets put an ideal school setting, middle class families with middle of the road laptops on a one to one program, where every student has their own laptop; for reference this is what my school district had in middle and high school. The next step is educating the educators to properly educate the students. How can a teacher teach if they don’t know what they don’t know? Say that five times fast. Well, just what should the teachers learn to be able to teach their students? The content changes drastically, so the better question is how to use the technology in front of them.
Since our school district has one to one devices and lives in a middle-class society, it’s safe to assume our students would have a flagship smart phone within the past 3 generations; which is more than enough to do what we would ask from an educational standpoint. Their laptop can be used for writing traditional papers, where our students can use the internet for research utilizing YouTube and online sources. This allows for our educators to teach the students about how to detect a creditable source and weed out fake news. These devices are also capable of doing simple adobe creation, may it be using Photoshop or illustrator to make a poster or flyer instead of being restricted to making something on paper. As for the teacher’s knowledge of something this complicated, luckily there are numerous resources online to teach the student on how to make what they want to make, thus making the only limitation to the student, time and their own imagination. As David Wallace talks about in his commencement speech, we take too much at face value, just because we are told that this is water, we assume that is. Wallace does a great job expressing in less than 30 minutes more than many journalists can in their whole life.
Smartphones are also a great resource whose potential goes untapped and unappreciated. There is such a negative stigma towards these devices which makes teachers deterred from using them in their classrooms. It is a level of ignorance or naivety that educators express, whereas they can use social media and these outstanding devices in a student’s pocket to further expand and critically analyse digital media. Especially when teaching students about fake news and determining what makes something creditable. As seen in the following video, students use digital media and understand it so extensively, the literacy that adolescents have towards technology is outstanding; it is our role as educators to further it and progress them to the best of their ability. No student should be hindered by the ignorance or arrogance of an educator, not to say that a student can’t teach a teacher, we learn from each other all the time; but more so that we don’t hinder their experience.
References
CommonSenseMedia. “The Common Sense Census: A Day in Teens’ Digital Lives.” YouTube, YouTube, 3 Nov. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH3YfRFBqFE.
“Cyanide and Happiness .” Explosm, explosm.net.
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water. YouTube, YouTube, 19 May 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=8CrOL-ydFMI.
Staff, EdTech. “More Than 50 Percent of Teachers Report 1:1 Computing.” Technology Solutions That Drive Education, 1 Feb. 2017, edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2017/02/more-50-percent-teachers-report-11-computing.
