Tonight, I watched and listened to the recorded webinar from
PBS called Education in the Digital Age: A Tour of FRONTLINE’s Digital Nation.
I have participated in one webinar before this but it was about how graduate school
online works so needless to say it was fairly boring. Thankfully, the content
of this webinar was much more interesting. I enjoyed the banter between the
administrator, interviewer, and guest.
The webinar started with just the administrator greeting all
the participants. She guided them through the functionality of the physical
webinar and how to use the different tools. I really liked one tool in
particular; polling. During the course of the webinar, the administrator could ask
questions and poll the participants’ answers. This seemed like a great way to
have all the participants feel involved and could communicate to the guest
speaker easily. There were other tools that were used during the discussion. A
magic wand aided in showing where people were located when the administrator
pulled up a map. Unfortunately, I could not see people posting where they were.
Lastly before the interview took place, the administrator polled the participants
on who was familiar with the FRONTLINE film Digital Nation. Most people were
not so I felt a little less lost.
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| Rachel Dretzin |
The interview was on the Rachel Dretzin, the producer of FRONTLINE’s film, Digital Nation.
She quickly gave a background on her own life and how she became involved with
the film. She stated that it was hard to separate her personal life from making
the film because she has young children who are very much a part of the digital
age. She went on to talk about connections from her previous films to Digital
Nation; the current film she is working on. (This is when I realized the film
hadn’t been completed yet and no one had seen it.)
Rachel Dretzin explained that Digital Nation was in the
works but the producers created a website a year in advance of the film’s
release date to have educators, administrators, and parents share stories so
they could view pieces of the film. I believe they launched the site early to
mostly build interest in the film.
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| Quest to Learn |
The basis of the movie, Dretzin said, was traveling around
to schools all over the country; elementary through college; to see how
involved technology is in education and students’ everyday life. She visited Quest To Learn, a school in New York
City, that was based on the video game paradigm. She was interested and pleased
to see that a school based on the video game concept didn’t have students
staring at screens all day. The school had students building games in physical
spaces as well has digital space to develop social, physical, and analytical
planning skills.
At this point of the webinar, the interview was over and the
administrator started to guide the participants through the FRONTLINE website
about Digital Nation. She pulled up a few video clips that the participants
could navigate on their own which I thought was pretty cool. Even though I
watched the webinar as a recording, I still could navigate the clips and the
chat bar on my own. The first video clip
was about Multitasking in a college lecture. The second clip was about a teacher using a social media site for her
students to create pages for their assigned characters of the book, To Kill a
Mockingbird. The last video clip
shown was about the digital divide between middle class students and
impoverished students.
At the end of the webinar was an extensive question and
answer section where participants could ask questions to Rachel Dretzin via the
chat bar or they could “raise their hand” (another tool) and could use their
personal microphone and speak with her directly so everyone could hear. After
the Q&A, the administrator took over again and posted upcoming webinars for
PBS and a survey the participants could take to give feedback and receive a
confirmation of completion letter.
Currently,
I am working as a special education one-on-one aide and I have
absolutely NO IDEA how my students and I would function without the
technology we use. One of my students uses adaptive technology such as
word prediction and text to speech. If he did not have this programs at
his disposal he would not be fluently reading or writing. Another one of
my students uses an iPad for a reward after he earns his seven tokens. It is so much faster to reward with a two minute iPad game versus a board game.
I found that it would be fairly difficult to administer a
webinar
for elementary school students since they are all in the classroom
together
anyways. However, if I was going to be out for a few days and was going
to have
a substitute, I would love to construct a webinar for my students to
contribute
in. Either one I could administer from afar or sign the class up for one
that
would reflect what they were currently learning. If I had my own
classroom I would be having my students blog their homework assignments
and give feedback to each other throughout the term. I would want them
to be productively engaged with each other at home as well as when they
are in school.
It was pretty difficult to find other sources to support findings
in the webinar since the webinar was about a film that hadn’t debuted yet.
However, I did come across an interesting article from Psychology Today titled, Technology: Myth of Multitasking that
brings up the opposite point of the film discussed in the webinar. The article
states that there is no such thing as multitasking in the way we think. We
think that multitasking is about getting multiple things done at the same time
but Psychology Today states that in order to multitask, one of the tasks either
needs to be automatic or use different brain processing. What does this mean
for students today? I think multitasking is really impossible unless one task
is automatic so children really need to be able to cut distractions.
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| To Kill a Mockingbird |
This webinar met a few of the course learning outcomes. The
webinar demonstrated the understanding of how technologies can effectively
promote student learning in the video clip, “Becoming Boo Radley.” The teacher
in this clip had the students want to
read the required reading, To Kill a Mockingbird because they want to
create social media profiles for the characters. The technologies created a
desire in the students to learn and grow from the reading.
The webinar helped me reflect upon and demonstrate effective
use of digital tools and resources because I have only been a part of one
webinar before and this one really described how to use the functions of the
tools. In my first webinar, I was strictly a listener and if I had seen this
one live, I know I would have been an active participant using the tools and asking
questions.
The webinar can help me demonstrate a comprehensive
understanding of safe, legal, and moral practices related to digital
information and technology because during the Q&A portion, the producer of
Digital Nation spoke to a mother worried about her child creating a blog for
class. “Won’t anybody be able to read what she writes?” Dretzin responded that
tech savvy teachers know to talk with their students about privacy settings,
using first names or pen names, and not to respond to people they don’t know.
I chose this webinar to watch because I thought it would
have some valuable insight to not just using technology in the classroom but
developing 21st century learners. I wanted to learn more about
different applications of technology that really grab at the students’ heart.
If I could have participated in this webinar I would have asked a question in
the Q&A. I wondered what age level students she has seen most benefit from
technology in the classroom.
I have included the link to the film, Digital Nation, below:
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