A report has just been released by the National PTA organization and Cable in the Classroom entitled Navigating the Children’s Media Landscape. This appears to be a good resource of parents, teachers, and those focused on media policy issues. The material covers issues associated with television, games, and the Internet and includes concrete suggestions for practice.
AECT – Association for Educational Communications and Technology – has recently recommended the copyright policy of the Los Angeles Unified School District. If you are looking for an outstanding model, you might examine this pdf.
A report has just been released by the National PTA organization and Cable in the Classroom entitled Navigating the Children’s Media Landscape. This appears to be a good resource of parents, teachers, and those focused on media policy issues. The material covers issues associated with television, games, and the Internet and includes concrete suggestions for practice.
I spent an hour videotaping in a computer lab yesterday as an elementary class worked on a project. The class was involved in a language arts project in which each student was creating a poem based on a favorite color. There is probably a name for the type of product the students were creating – I just don’t happen to know what it is. The poem started and ended with the identification of the color (e.g., green) and each line of the poem identified an object of the desired color (e.g., grass) and a statement about this object (e.g., Green is the color of grass that tickles your bare feet in summer). Students were in the lab because the teacher was having students create books based on their poems using iPhoto. Each line of the poem was to be a page in this book and iPhoto was being used to collect images from the Internet for use in this project and for creating the book. Students were using the special image option within Google to locate an appropriate image for each line of the poem.
Anyway, I am sitting in this lab attempting to operate two video cameras (one on a tripod and one I was carrying). As I moved about the lab, I started thinking about contentions made in the book about class applications of technology I was just reading (Oppenheimer’s Flickering Minds. I started to evaluate whether the observations Oppenheimer made while visiting labs now matched may own. Were many of the students off track and wondering about? Were students struggling with the technology? Was the teacher frustrated? Was the technology not functioning as intended? The answer to each of these questions was a resounding – NO! I noticed no difficulties. The teacher’s printed instructions were quite sufficient to guide students through the use of both iPhoto and Google. Students worked intensely. The computers, software, and Internet all worked perfectly. Oppenheimer purposefully sought out award winning schools and teachers to evaluate technology applications and reported struggles and problems. I walk into the lab operated by a teacher who happens to be working with a pre-service teacher from our teacher education program and I encounter a situation that could be the basis for an ad for a computer company.
What am I to make of this!
Maybe folks should not take strong positions based on anecdotal observations. I don’t know if Oppenheimer went out to find negative anecdotes. I did not really decide to observe a classroom to make a positive statement about technology, but I suppose my motives could be questioned. One of my colleagues is fond of saying, often in response to some challenge I make to a position he is taking, “I guess this is an empirical question.
Way back, when I was in graduate school, there were methods of studying classroom processes. For example, I remember the Flander’s system for analyzing classroom interaction. Every three seconds, an observer would write down a number corresponding to a category of behavior that happened to be dominant at that time (teacher talk, question, response, etc.). There must be a way to do something similar as a way to study time on task in computer labs. If one created a system for categorizing student behavior while working on activities in a computer lab, what would an appropriate comparison be? Oppenheimer might offer knitting or carving or recorder practice time as the comparison (I know this sounds weird – read the book). How about “research time” in the school library? Would the inability to find “human genome” in the outdated encyclopedia be scored as a “technology failure”?