Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.11.10 | “Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12” aims to help teachers understand young people’s new digital lives and think about how to integrate new media tools and pedagogies into their classrooms.

Written by Jessica Parker, an assistant professor of education at Sonoma State University, the book features contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, educators, counselors, students and specialists in the areas of new media and learning.

Chapters include essays on learning through video, role-playing and performance, Wikipedia, remixing and virtual worlds. Together it’s a mix of the “visionary and pragmatic,” writes Henry Jenkins, who recently led a discussion on his blog with Parker and several of the book’s contributors, including Erin Reilly, Maryanne Berry and Phil Halpern.

Parker told Jenkins she wanted to avoid “framing the book as a teacher’s guide with a focus on one single subject with cut-and-paste activities for the classroom” and instead hoped to get teachers involved in a conversation about learning in the 21st century. Parker knows this is a tall order, given the crazy schedules and pressures most educators today are under: “We need to stop running on our treadmills and start asking serious questions about what it means to learn, to be literate, and to know something in a mediated culture.”

Indeed, the book is full of examples and contributors emphasize the importance of providing teachers and students with ample time to play and explore new technologies.

“Teaching Tech-Savvy kids” draws heavily from “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures,” a three-year ethnographic study.

Parker has created a great website where teachers can share resources and participate in discussions about the book. And on Jenkins’ site she stressed the crucial role of teachers in the movement to change learning:

With this book, I wanted to invite educators, specifically classroom teachers, into this larger discussion of digital media and learning (DML). I felt that if I wrote a book for teachers my invitation needed to connote, “I trust you. Here is something that I want to share with you. I value your opinion and your insights.”

In the DML community, there is a sense that this current moment is a defining one. It is a profound moment. And I don’t think my collective academic community has reached out enough to classroom teachers to say, “Join us in this moment.” Join us—even though we may exist as researchers, educators, and mentors in different learning environments—join us as we analyze these important educational concepts and discuss how learning, literacy and knowledge creation and sharing are changing. Changing the culture of learning within schools starts with teachers.