Students Are Using New Media

One of the greatest misunderstandings rural teachers can have is that their district's size precludes participation in many media. For example, many teachers may not consider integrating new media into the classroom because the students won't see the impact. 10 minutes on YouTube may just change your mind.

When I punched the name of the small school district that I work for into YouTube, over 2,100 results were returned. A simple Boolean string to remove the "crud" that was not relevant still returned over 1,000 videos relevant to the town. A village of 9,821 people, that's about a video result per ten residents. Most of these new found videos were not education relevant, but I did find actual school projects that students had created then uploaded to the site.

At present our district does not engage in video production instruction. The skills these students are demonstrating they are learning outside of the school day. These students are planning projects, creating texts (Content Creation), making rhetorical decisions as authors of those texts(Rhetoric and Composition), and publishing these texts in a way that they can get instant feedback from peers (Social Networking). They are demonstrating an understanding of what is appropriate and how to conduct themselves in this environment (Digital Citizenship).

Not every video exemplary of a well constructed text, and not every interaction on the site is professional, courteous, or even appropriate. These are serious concerns that educators and parents alike should be aware of. We must also remember that most of these students have received no instruction or background in constructing 21st Century texts or the concepts of Digital Citizenship and Internet boundaries. These are important skills for parents to emphasise at home but it is also time to move these practices into schools.

These are the media in which students will live, work, and play. As educators, we need to understand the media, and demonstrate to students that the critical analysis we apply to "traditional" texts hold just as valid to "21st Century" texts (i.e. YouTube). With the free and widespread availability of these media, it is more important than ever for educators to teach the critical analysis of these texts. The bottom line is that students are currently living, playing, and some even working in these forms of communication and we can either let them effectively use them or effectively be used by them.