Media Literacy in Education

The question of whether or not we should teach media literacy in our schools is ridiculous. Of course we should. Technology continues to intertwine itself in every aspect of our lives, and this trend will not be reversed. As part of this expansion of technology, the internet, television, and all other forms of media strive to get our attention at every minute of the day. As such, not making media literacy a major component of curriculum would be irresponsible.

It can be very easy to be hoodwinked by media. The Iraq War is a good case study here. In the chaotic months following 9/11, many otherwise intelligent people accepted any and all information about Iraq that was given to them, without interrogating the veracity of the sources. This was due in large part to the alarmist presentation of the supposed facts, which swept many people up, leading to war under false pretenses.

This is not dissimilar to what happens with advertising. Everything about how an advertisement is constructed is designed to manipulate, playing off of our assumptions and tastes in order to get us to purchase or believe something. If one is not aware of this process, it is impossible to critically evaluate the information that we are given in order to make the best choices.

Lastly, as students and non-students alike increasingly turn to the internet for information, we must be aware of the ways in which this form of media is shaping our perceptions. In the course of research, it can be very easy to find websites that support any argument or viewpoint. If one treats all websites as equal, then it can be difficult to weed out bogus information. We must teach our students media literacy skills so that they can make informed choices and use the internet effectively for educational purposes.

I was familiar with the concept of media literacy before it was presented to us in class, but I had never really explored that concept or tried to apply it to an educational mindset. As I made clear in the opening paragraph of this post, I know feel that it is crucial to an effective twenty-first century education and I plan to integrate it into my future classroom.

First Experience with Digital Stories

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been a contributor to Chicago Public Radio for about two and a half years. As such, I’ve gotten a lot of practice with Pro Tools and Vegas, two pieces of audio editing software. Even though I had never made a digital story or really done any video editing before, I wasn’t all that stressed about being assigned a digital story project in class. I figured that any video software I used would be close enough to Pro Tools that I could pick it up without much trouble. I started out trying to use Windows Movie Maker for Windows 8, but the interface was terrible and it was really difficult to figure out how to take advantage of a lot of the program’s functions (which is pretty much how things go for everything Windows 8), but I had much better luck with the iMovie app on my iPad. Aside from a few small problems (more on those later), iMovie was exactly what I was hoping the video editing process would be, and I was able to make my four-minute video in a relatively short amount of time. On the other hand, picking a subject for my digital story was by far the hardest part of the assignment.

I knew right away that I wasn’t too interested in making a digital story with a personal subject. The examples we saw in class all seemed to be about the creators of the pieces (or the creator’s pets), and that didn’t appeal to me, for three reasons. First, I thought that any digital story with me as the subject wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as one on another topic. Second, I rarely take pictures, so I don’t exactly have a big collection of personal photos to work from for a project like this. Finally, I honestly wasn’t all that comfortable with making a video about myself and putting it up on YouTube.

It took me a while, but I eventually settled on Sun Ra as the subject of my digital story. I did a research project on Sun Ra when I was a grad student at Loyola, and I am a pretty big fan of his music. Plus, he claimed that he was part of an angel race from Saturn and managed to get dozens of people to live in a compound with him and play in his band during a period of four decades, which I think is pretty interesting. It’s easy to write Sun Ra off as mentally ill (as the U.S. military did when they gave him 4F status during World War II), but I’ve always found it much more interesting to just take his claims at face value and go from there. As such, I chose not to acknowledge the craziness of his ideas and instead present Sun Ra as an alien rather than try to grapple with mental illness in a four minute video about an avant-garde musician.

Sun Ra’s art isn’t exactly populist, and I can see why many people would find it (and everything about him) a little too weird, but that weirdness is a big part of what I find so appealing about his work. Seeing everyone in class looking confused during the video—especially during the clips from his 1972 movie Space is the Place—is pretty much exactly what I expected the response to be when I was making it.

In spite of liking iMovie better than Windows Movie Maker, I didn’t love every aspect of it. Since I made my digital story on the iPad version of iMovie, there were some functions that weren’t available to me. I couldn’t figure out how to change the movement or size of images that I inputted, so some photos, like Sun Ra’s Rolling Stone cover and some pictures of the Arkestra, only showed up as zoomed-in fragments. Also, I realized about 75% of the way through making the video that the first forty-five seconds of the video were just two still images, but I couldn’t change that without disrupting everything that came later, which was very frustrating. In spite of these few problems, I did really enjoy making my digital story. However, considering how time consuming it is and how many great video resources there already are, I can’t see myself taking the time to make many digital stories for classroom use down the line. I am open, however, to assigning students digital stories as components of projects.

On My First Experience with Twitter Chats and Online Professional Learning Networks

Image Source: Twitter

I don’t like Twitter very much. I avoided it for the first few years of its existence, and when I was forced two years ago to get a Twitter account to promote my work at Chicago Public Radio, I used it begrudgingly. Brevity has never been my strong suit, so the 140 character limit has always been tough for me, and I didn’t enjoy the rapid fire nature of Twitter feeds. My Twitter usage eventually tapered off to nothing after a little over a year, and I was not too excited to have to rejoin Twitter as part of EDU560.

            Using my new Twitter account for the purposes of finding educational resources and connecting with other education professionals has turned my opinion around somewhat. If you follow enough people and organizations (I’m at 159 as of this writing), you get bombarded with hundreds of tweets each day, many of which link to articles and other resources. For instance, I followed ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education, because it seemed appropriate for this class. ISTE is a tremendous resource for innovative ideas in educational technology, and one article in particular jumped out at me. I did my Trends in Ed Tech presentation on Creative Commons, and open education, along with copyright law as it pertains to education, have become major interests for me. ISTE post numerous articles about navigating the messy world of internet copyrights, and their article “Find free and fair use photos,” gives several insights into how to protect your students from breaking copyright law while working on school projects. The author, Keith Ferrell, lists several resources for finding free and licensed photos for student use online. He also describes a project that he does with his own fifth grade students in order to explain why these resources are so important. He easily does so, and also provides a great example of how to integrate technology into lessons with his book trailer project.

            Twitter makes it easy to stumble upon resources like this. Just sit in front of your Twitter feed for a few minutes and you’re bound to find something useful. However, this kind of resource search is more practical using Google or another search engine instead of Twitter, so that aspect hasn’t done too much to sell me on Twitter’s value, although Twitter Chats did a bit. Early on the morning of March 7 (6:30am, to be exact, since the start time was set by people living on the east coast), I joined my first #satchat. From what I understand, #satchat is one of the larger Ed Chats around (with people from all over the world participating), and to say that it could be overwhelming is an understatement. For much of the chat, I couldn’t even read entire tweets before they got pushed out of sight on the feed. It was hard to follow the conversations that other people were having. I saw people’s replies but not the original tweets, and the lack of context made it hard to understand everything that people were saying. Every time I tried to reply to someone, I lost track of the entire chat and had to struggle to reorient myself after I finished typing. I was able to have a few conversations with other educators in the course of the chat, although they were pretty cursory considering the 140 character limit.

A look at the #satchat feed and some of the interactions I was having with other professionals. Image source: Tweetdeck

            On the other hand, the #satchat was well structured, with six questions and posted start times for each question, making it a little easier to hang on to what people were talking about. Also, the one-on-one conversations I had with some people during the course of the #satchat were great, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to converse with other educators around the country (getting treated as an equal in the conversations even though I’m not yet a licensed teacher was great too). This kind of professional learning network can be very valuable in giving us perspectives and ideas that we might not otherwise be exposed to in our own districts. I still don’t love Twitter, but I’m looking forward to the next #satchat. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up this next time.

ACOT Stages of Technology and My Work in the Classroom

Screenshot of Proloquo2go, a communication app that we have some of our students use. Image source: Apple App Store

            My family got a Windows 3.1 computer in 1993. I was five years old. My parents needed it for work, but we got a package of CD-Rom games with it, which my sister and I were allowed to play. At the time, I was just focusing on putting in hours with Reader Rabbit and Spider-Man Cartoon Maker, but now I realize that I was very fortunate to be exposed to technology in my home at such a young age, even if it was initially just for games. As I grew up, we moved from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP, and I used the computer every day through all of the upgrades. As a result, new technology comes relatively easy to me. I certainly couldn’t get a job fixing computers at a Best Buy or an Apple Store, but computers and other technology are intuitive enough for me that I can usually pick up new things in that realm pretty quickly.

            This has been particularly helpful since I started working at elementary and middle schools two years ago. As my district has integrated more and more technology into the classrooms in which I work, I have often become the de facto tech guy among the teachers and TAs that I work closely with. It’s not that I am an expert in educational technology or technology in general (I’m not), but I’ve become savvy enough with technology over the last twenty years that I’m usually able to figure out how to fix problems that come up in the classroom. I’ve become well acquainted with hardware such as iPads, Apple TVs, and SmartBoards, as well as software and apps such as Proloquo2go, Book Creator, and Canvas, all of which I’ve used in the last year in my multiage middle school special ed classroom. Additionally, I use Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms for data collection and other correspondence with teachers, which has been extremely useful as empirical data has started to loom over public education.

            Looking at the stages laid out in Apple’s Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT), I find that I fall somewhere between stages four and five, appropriation and innovation, although I see more of myself in the description of stage five. It’s tough for me as a TA, since I can make suggestions to the teachers I work with but I do not actually have direct control over how and which technology is used in my classroom. I certainly do not use technology in every lesson, which pushes me out of the fourth stage. I prefer to use it only when I feel it is valuable which, with the incredible variety of educational technologies out today, is a little under half the time. We have some technology in our classroom, both hardware and apps on the student iPads, that we don’t use, but since all students at my school got identical apps regardless of individual utility, my special ed students don’t get much use out of quite a few of them. As a result, if there is excess in my approach to educational technology, it is not something I currently have much control over.

            On the other hand, while I am generally comfortable placing myself in stage five (innovation) that same lack of control over the direction of my classroom gives me pause. Part of stage five is a selectiveness with technology used in the classroom. While I am confident that I would be selective, and I don’t always agree with the way that technology is used in my classroom, I don’t yet have enough agency to exert much influence on this front. On the other hand, we use technology as only one component of our instruction rather than shoehorning it into every place we can, and most of the times technology is used it is not the only aspect of a lesson or assignment. For instance, I travel with one of my students to a general education science classroom every day, and we are currently working on mousetrap cars in order to teach physics concepts and simple machines. Students are working in teams to draw blueprints, study related terms and concepts, and construct the cars. At the same time, all students in the class are using the Book Creator app on their iPads to individually log and analyze their group’s progress. Technology does not overpower this project. Instead, it is used as an additional component to strengthen students’ learning. That seems to be the essence of the innovation stage, and I am pretty confident that I’ll be at that point by the time I have my own classroom, if I’m not there already.

            However, this study was done thirty years ago, so I think its levels are losing their value in the present, especially with younger teachers. Technological literacy has only been increasing over the last three decades, and more teachers who grew up surrounded by this technology are entering the field every year. Education professionals with stage four technology usage, who have embraced technology and are flailing in an attempt to use it as much as possible, are going to become less common as younger teachers who are comfortable with technology get through the first few stages before they even enter the classroom. If one grows up immersed in technology, she is less likely to be dazzled by new technology and to struggle to use it effectively. Instead, they will be comfortable with technology from the get go. Still leaning on a study conducted in an era where personal computing was still the domain of the very few and the internet didn’t yet exist in a form suitable for mass usage strikes me as folly in an era where technology has become one of the centerpieces of our society.