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Students Use Technology For Critical Thinking

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By JO-ANN JOHNSTON, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 17, 2007

DADE CITY - These days at Pasco High School, some students are delivering their assigned book reviews not on traditional printed pages, but through podcasts - audio or video dispatches that can be broadcast over the Internet. For another assignment, one student will produce a short public-service announcement about the hazards of cyberbullying, the cruel way some children harass each other by using e-mail, cell phones or other new digital technologies.

Teacher Abigail Kennedy said she has good reason for making such assignments. When her students watch TV, listen to their iPods, surf the Web and read text messages on their cell phones, she wants them to understand they shouldn't believe everything they hear or read, and learn ways they can distinguish facts from hype and opinion.

Students reared in the print-only decades needed to learn those lessons too, but Kennedy and other teachers of "media literacy" are applying the concept now to the many new forums of communication. Proponents remind parents that just because your kids grew up learning how to operate computers and TVs and other electronics, they don't necessarily have the skills to evaluate media "content."

"With media being so prevalent in the world," Kennedy said, "if they're not taught how to view it, they can be passive viewers, and can be taken advantage of." So naturally, Kennedy was thrilled earlier this year when a student told her the young teacher had "ruined" the girl's enjoyment of television commercials.

Teaching Technique Got Attention

Others are impressed with Kennedy's teaching techniques. This weekend she will receive a national award from the National Council of Teachers of English. It's the second year the award has been given by the professional group, which has 60,000 members nationally.

Kennedy receives no cash prize. The council's awards are instead meant to promote idea-sharing among teachers, said David Bruce, an advocate of 21st century media literacy instruction. Bruce is eager for other teachers to see some assignments Kennedy has crafted, and the work her students turn in.

A sampling of podcasts submitted last year for book reviews is still on Kennedy's Web site, www.turtlesteach.com. One girl, who reviewed a fantasy novel featuring teens who can fly like birds, opens her broadcast with a movie-like simulation of a girl flying, and then proceeds with her summary and comments. The broadcasts generally feature a mix of still photos of book covers and authors, video and audio clips of the students speaking and bits of text.

All the podcasts suggest the students were enjoying the assignment. Savannah Schultz, a senior in Kennedy's multimedia class, said her teacher "always incorporates things that are fun."

Still, the assignments teach serious lessons, Kennedy said. When students are assigned to create an announcement, she said, by learning to "construct a message" they better understand how advertisements work and how to "deconstruct" those messages.

"It's really critical thinking," said Schultz, who added that she doesn't watch television the same way she did before enrolling in some of Kennedy's classes.

Monitoring Work Is Easier

Using the new media also offers other advantages, Kennedy said. When students do their book reviews in podcasts, she can tell if they haven't really read their chosen text or written their own script by the words they select. "You can tell right away if it's not their vocabulary."

Also, most of her students have to use the laptop computers and software in her classroom to complete the assignments, she noted, so she can see them producing their original work.

Students also hear and see their counterparts at work, Kennedy said, and that prods them to do more revisions of their own work. That, she said, is because they can hear how badly it sounds to an audience when a broadcaster speaks from a poorly written script, or stumbles over his or her words. Assignments involving use of some kind of broadcast medium also allow students a comfortable way to practice using the communications skills they use daily in the academic world, Kennedy said.

So far, most of the assignments Kennedy has given students revolve around understanding literature or advertising, she said.

She and Bruce said, however, that students will have an opportunity to apply the lessons of critical thinking to the 2008 presidential election, when all the candidates will use Web sites and Internet broadcasts and alternative media.

Reporter Jo-Ann Johnston can be reached at (352) 521-3062 or jfjohnston@tampatrib.com.

FOR INFORMATION

www.turtlesteach.com>, Abigail Kennedy's site

www.medialit.org>, the Center for Media Literacy, an educational group.

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