Journal 4: “Finding Students Who Learn with Media” (Nets 5)

Bull, G. (2010). Finding studnets who learn with media. Learning and leading with technology, 37(5). Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=February_No_5_4&Template=/MembersOnly.cfm&NavMenuID=4495&ContentID=25255&DirectListComboInd=D.

Glen Bull details his experiences with having students create a student narrated video that incorporates primary documents and images about the United States in the 1930’s. The assignment uses Primary Access Movie Maker, a web based program, to reduce technology learning time and allow students to focus more on the specific project than the technology they are using to create the project. After tracking student involvement and outcomes from this assignment, Bull notes that students fall into four categories: “high technology/high content,” “high technology/low content,” “high content/low technology,” and “low content/low technology.” The students in the high/high group are engaged by all aspects of the assignment and it is a rewarding and authentic learning experience for them. Those students engaged in the high/low group are engaged in the process of making the video and as a by-product of this engagement, learn some of the content that they might not have otherwise. Those in the low/high group are more likely to enjoy researching and writing an essay than making the video. The low/low group is not connecting to the activity at all. According to Bull, part of the benefit of this project for teachers is that it allows teachers to track how students are engaging with technology and content online. This tracking, in turn, can aid teachers in tailoring their pedagogy and curriculum to the learning styles in their classroom.

Question 1: How could you incorporate some of the suggestions in this article in a classroom?

The information about using online tools to track how students are engaging with assignments is of particular interest to me. Bull mentions that part of what makes for authentic learning is the “degree of student choice” offered. Perhaps an assignment early on might show that a good percentage of your class might enjoy research and writing as much as others enjoy working with media. With this knowledge, you could offer students the option of writing an essay or making a video and engage more students more effectively at the same time. Alternatively, you could alternate traditional and media based assignments for big projects.

Question 2: Is there more information needed in addition to that provided in the article to know how you would implement these ideas in a classroom?

Yes. I don’t understand how they were able to track student engagement with both technology and content online to come to the conclusions they did. They might have tracked time spent fiddling with the technology and how well students performed on tests and then linked the two, or maybe they tracked these factors in an entirely different way. In order to replicate this sort of assignment, including the tracking for future use, in a meaningful way, I would need to understand how the tracking occurred.