According to a new Kaiser media habits study, kids are spending 7 1/2 hours (yup!) with media every day. You can read more about it in the NY Times here.
Interesting to note that the cell phone is growing in importance as the default media device.
What does this mean for us as educators? How many hours a day do we adults spend online?
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The first thing this means to me as an educator is that we need to invest in interesting wellness programs so that we can encourage our kids to lead more active lives. I'm guessing most of our time spent interacting with digital media is sedentary. Kids -- and adults -- don't need to be more sedentary. We're all getting fatter. Do we need to go on digital diets...?
ReplyDeleteSecondly, the Kaiser study says that kids are spending the majority of their time online engaged in "entertainment". Everyone's gotta have a little fun. But if kids are spending the majority of their time online shopping, chatting, texting, or playing "World of Warcraft", I would say this isn't such a good thing.
I love that digital technology allows me to access information 24 hours a day. But even though I spend most of my time reading and viewing intellectually engaging information, too much of a good thing is, well, too much of a good thing. (Sitting around all day reading well-written books or watching NOVA is probably too much of a good thing, too.) Too much of a bad thing -- playing video games or spending hours pouring over our friends' Facebook pages -- is even worse.
I think we need to find ways to incorporate all kinds of digital media into our curriculum. I think all teachers need to be comfortable using digital media. We should make sure we can help kids access interesting information online. Perhaps we should be tweeting our homework updates. Maybe if we could find a way to make Angel look more like Facebook, kids would do their homework...? But we can't use digital media at the expense of other important experiences -- physical activity, face-to-face dialoge and debate, group problem solving, etc. And we shouldn't use it just because the kids like it, or it's "new".
Today in Health class, students were eager to interview their music teacher about creative outlets to relieve stress. A short trip to the music room couldn't find him, so they phoned him up, and a fantastic conversation/interview followed. I wish that we had put him on speaker phone for the rest of the class to hear. I enjoyed the immediacy of the interview, and the students really embraced the interview as a research method after that great phone call. The simplicity of access that the cell phone offered at that moment was only evident to me, the old fart in the room who had only recently become familiar with the joys of cell technology.
ReplyDeleteI was a little proud of the students in their wise use of the cell phone, and others in the class saw the great results as well. I'd like to see if others out there have found the ubiquitous cell phone a usable technology for class. It's got everything now!