The Media Spot

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.

Frontline interviews kids, parents and educators about the increasingly mediated experiences of youth, how they affect home life, identity, and education, and how kids' online lives often spin out of their control. Adolescence is playing out, often simultaneously, in the physical world as well as the "always on" digital world of social networking web sites like Myspace and Facebook. Kids are extending their social world into an area without the adult order and supervision of their home, community and school environments. This often presents complex versions of classic issues (like bullying, a.k.a. "cyberbullying") that kids, parents, and schools are having a hard time understanding and adapting to.

Particularly relevant to the work of The Media Spot is the chapter on "revolutions in the classroom", where teachers explain that some established ways of teaching are losing relevance with today's students. Some are adjusting through technology integration and developing new strategies and perspectives on old subjects, where others are fighting to hold on to traditional curricula and instructional methods.

The Media Spot believes that integration of new media and the teaching goals of traditional curricula are not mutually exclusive. Our approach has always aimed at bridging gaps between teachers' proven instructional practices and knowledge, and students' perspective on the world. Kids obviously have a knack for operating new technologies -- even at the elementary school level -- often with more proficiency than their instructors. The process we engage in with teachers and students allows for hands-on practice with new media, but we see the real potential for curriculum-based multimedia production in how it can support foundational elements of education -- critical thinking, critical analysis of texts, and the ability to communicate fluently in a variety of forms. Through the integration of digital productions based on content in the standard curriculum, teachers can encourage kids to establish a confident voice in these new digital realms in concert with the standards of traditional literacy. Educators engaging with students collaboratively on these productions can teach students responsibility and safety in the digital world, and the ability to maintain a critical understanding of who they are in relation to the media they interact with.

Growing Up Online provides access to the behavior and perspective of today's students that can help us find new connections to their ways of seeing the world, regardless of how those efforts are integrated into your way teaching.