The two articles we were assigned to read and the one TEDx Talk we were asked to watch all address the point that educators and educational institutions must open up spaces for digital invention; the short video and readings emphasize that media literacy is a key 21st century skill. Authors Mirra, Morrell, and Filipiak believe that 21st century youth must move beyond being passive consumers of digital technologies and towards digital innovation, distribution, and production. The authors state that in order to become proficient inventors, educators should seek out the pedagogic use of digital media and teach their students that different forms of media can be used to communicate a message. Similarly, Professor Degand’s article stresses the importance of encouraging critical thinking in digital media art production spaces. Degand proposes that media arts programs should actively teach students to critique the societal stereotypes they encounter in media artwork. He hopes for educators to establish egalitarian production spaces in which their students can create prosocial media products that aim to achieve collectivist goals. Finally, in her TEDx, Erica Halverson argues that in today’s society it is imperative to teach creativity and innovation to young people, and this is done through art. She mentions that nowadays art plays a large role in identity development and literacy learning. According to Halverson, literacy should be seen as “productive-oriented activity” in which people make meaning and freely express themselves using the tools they have access to.
While reading the two articles and watching the TEDx, I immediately thought about my personal K-12 experience. I recall my sixth-grade teacher stating that he wanted to “change things up” for this one assignment; instead of asking us to complete a traditional writing assignment, after reading the book “The Giver”, he assigned us a creativity task with hopes that students will retain a higher percentage of the book’s educational content. He asked us to use any form of digital media that appealed to us, in order to depict a specific scene in the book. I remember being fascinated by Apple’s application, iMovie. Thus, I gathered a bunch of my classmates together and we acted out a scene from the book. We recorded ourselves using the built-in camera on the Mac laptop and complied/edited the video together using iMovie’s features. As a result of conducting this activity, my classmates and I developed imperative day-to-day skills such as working together; we learned how to collaborate with one another and to cohesively integrate our ideas in order to create a successful end product.
Questions:
- Evidently, low-income students and less likely than more affluent students to create texts using technology. How can this issue be addressed?
- How much time should schools designate to developing digital media skills in their students?
- Out of curiosity, how many students in our class had a digital media program integrated in their K-12 education?
UWP 104D 