Chapter 4 Reflection

Mainstream education currently doesn't encourage, and rarely requires, students to produce schoolwork in "new media" format such as digital stories. Time requirements as well as technology availability are certainly reasons for this... In an era of No Child Left Behind, there is little incentive for teachers to branch out into new areas of literacy or content exploration...

Jason B. Ohler. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity (pp. 62-63). Kindle Edition. 

 I agree with the above statement. Even though I believe that students could greatly benefit from DST, there are these limitations. And then there is also this issue of assessing the work: "Without a practical, meaningful way to assess new media, teachers are understandably reluctant to include it in the curriculum" (p. 63). I can create my rubrics, but I am still unsure if those are a good way to approach this issue.


The other quote that stood out was this:

If we want our kids to be "smarter," and if what we mean by that is more useful in the real world, then we need to recognize that a large part of the real world consists of the tEcosystem.

Jason B. Ohler. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity (p. 63). Kindle Edition. 

 The Title Ischool I taught at last year was loaded with technology. We needed a class set of computers, we got it. Almost any period during the day. Many students did not have such technology available at home, so all the "digital literacy" they learned was learned at school. So, I believe that school needs to be that place that provides our students with tools needed in order to succeed in this world. Because not every parent can provide their child with the equipment and necessary "how-to's", there needs to be a place in a child's life where all of that is possible. School is a perfect place for that. 


I liked a quote from previous chapters, and I believe that it still applies even in the situations as I described above: "It's not important that teachers be advanced technicians. Their students will cover that for them" (p. 13). Even at that school where students only had technology available to them at school, they still taught me a lot about technology (one example, putting an "s" after http in the address bar in order to "unblock" YouTube... and little things like that).