Jim Shawley's High School American Government Blog: Blog #2: Utilizing Different Types of Media

In the previous post, we discussed how methodology in pedagogy has been undergoing a change thanks in no small measure to the changes in information technology. In this post, we will look at different ways to utilize the six forms of media, integrating as many as practicable forming multimedia--interactive content, animation, audio, visual, still image, and text.

A question to be asked might, and indeed ought, to be, where does one gain all the "stuff"--the hardware, the software, the resources (and can those resources be trusted--both in terms of security, yet also in accuracy and bias?) to accomplish all this?

BYOD

Let us first analyze this idea: Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD. In a video produced by the Peel District School Board, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, Tony Pontes, Director of Education, asserted that "it's a well-accepted point of view that only schools that normalize the use of technology in everyday teaching will be able to meet society's ever growing and more sophisticated expectations." This was driven home personally while student teaching, as I would on occasion be discussing interactively among the students some concept, and would use (quite deliberately) a new term. I would stop, hop up from my stool, repair to the marker board, and call out "Table 3! Smartphone! Look this up, and tell us what it means." After a couple times of that, I only needed to call out the table number. Of course I would pick a random number from 1 to 7. The good part? The scholars enjoyed doing it! Of course, students at other tables were already looking, trying to beat the assigned table. In other words, active learning is occurring, at least for some of the students, as they are interacting.

There is, at least to this author, a little discomfort concerning BYOD: How does one control content? As Paul Muller of Hewlett-Packard's HP Enterprise Business "Discover Performance Weekly" E-zine and his guests ask the question (albeit from a business, rather than an educational, perspective), "does BYOD mean 'Bring your own device', or does it mean 'Bring your own disaster'?" It's worth a look-see. Questions regarding ownership and security are worth addressing. Of course, to eliminate the concerns that BYOD might create, a district need merely go to 1:1.

Curation

Hollywood's computer graphics capabilities have simply exploded, such that all too often, movies are all about the CGI skills, and not about the plot. But nothing beats the real thing, and this includes ancient Greek triremes. With but one real trireme at their disposal, the special effects firms can digitally "build" hundreds, and then enact battles on film that are as close to reality as the human mind can imagine. But where to find such a ship? On the internet, of course. And there, I found, compliments of funding from The Trireme Trust of the United Kingdom, a fully constructed, totally seaworthy trireme, built and launched by the Hellenic Navy. While student teaching about Ancient Greece, the rather boring subjects of the Battle of the Artemesium Strait and the Strait of Salamis were inevitable. It is one thing to stand at the board and ask, "Anyone know what a trireme is? Anyone? Anyone?"; it is another to see a video of a real, seaworthy, manned trireme in action, complete with a bronze ram mounted on the prow. And thus we were able to see how the H.N. Olympias performed with an amateur crew. From that we could reasonably speculate how a trireme, manned with professionals, would perform in a battle situation.

I discovered Olympias on a website, written by one "lakodaemon". While the site was a virtual mother lode of information on ancient Greece, all the way back to the Mycenaean civilization, I could not copy or save any of the pictures; I could, however, "pin" the pictures onto Pinterest--and so I did.

What I didn't realize I was doing was engaging in "the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that relates to a specific subject..." as described in THE Journal's December 18, 2012 edition. While I did not carry the curation as far as the article recommends, providing for boards, accessible to students, I still began the curation journey. We shall see where it goes, once my teaching career begins in earnest.

In all this, whether BYOD or 1:1, and with curation of visuals and with videos as shown above, students can interact more deeply than the "Ferris Bueller" economics instructor character's students. Therein lies the rub. This is the 21st century. And this is the 21st century classroom.