The Media Spot

Mr. Destefano, a friend and consulting educator for TMS, is at it again with his high school class in Littleton, Colorado: the 2008 Tech Turn-off.

Each year Mr. D asks his class to forgo TV, movies, text messaging, email and other communication technologies for a week, and journal their experiences on their class blog. The class always generates thoughtful discussion of the role these technologies play: the ways they help and hinder us; the ways they interconnect and isolate us; the effect they have on our physical, social, and emotional landscape.

The PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online, is an exploration of the digital world that kids are spending a lot of time in these days. Frontline may tend to put a hard spin issues like this, but this one was SCARY... And I'm not even a parent! If this is not a fair depiction of American youth at present, one can easily imagine it in the near future. Educators take various worthy positions on the form media education should take into schools -- teach about media without technology, teach about media through collaborative production (wink), etc. Whatever position you take, it is clear, evidenced by videos like this, that emerging digital technologies impact kids' identity formation and what it means to be a citizen in our culture, and the it is the responsibility of schools to adapt to that influence one way or another.

We've accomplished some great things in the first 10 days of our 30-day residency at The Parkside School in Brooklyn (PS 130). The blog network is set up, first graders are making videos that will provide a window into their exciting school lives, we've developed a strong policy for online safety, and a framework for a technology plan is in place.

I recently began consulting with Australian and United States Services in Education (AUSSIE), a professional development company renowned for their math and literacy consulting in over 650 schools in New York, Australia and New Zealand. My first assignment, at The Anderson School (PS 334) in Manhattan, is to establish a technology plan, and configure and roll-out a content management system for their school community powered by eChalk.

At PS 124 we're approaching the year-and-a-half point of our media education residency. In that time we've developed a network of blogs that has become known as "The PS 124 Online Learning Network". This group of websites are the foundation of the school's media ed and technology integration program, used for student practice with the Internet and web publishing, archiving of lesson plans, rubrics, and curriculum maps, and as a community resource for general school info and announcements.

Last Friday, I was honored to represent TMS at a small group discussion between 18 educators and media literacy consultants to discuss fair use in media education at The Academy for Educational Development in Manhattan. The event was a follow up to the release of The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy (PDF), the first report of The Center for Social Media's attempt to develop a national "code of practices" to allow media literacy educators to develop curricula without fear of legal action, which I was interviewed for last spring. The discussion has me feeling pretty confident about how TMS deals with copyrighted material in our collaborative production work.

Over the past 2 years we've been promoting school blogs as a tool for incorporating media education in the classroom and teaching students safe and responsible online habits. Any talk of blogging or social networking and kids these days doesn't get far without a discussion of online safety. With all the hype around Internet predators and cyber-bullies lurking on blogs and sites like MySpace (enter Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator I, II, or III...") there is (understandably) a lot of resistence to introducing social networking tools into the K-12 environment.