The Media Spot

Mr. Destefano, a friend and consulting educator for TMS, is at it again with his high school class in Littleton, Colorado: the 2008 Tech Turn-off.

Each year Mr. D asks his class to forgo TV, movies, text messaging, email and other communication technologies for a week, and journal their experiences on their class blog. The class always generates thoughtful discussion of the role these technologies play: the ways they help and hinder us; the ways they interconnect and isolate us; the effect they have on our physical, social, and emotional landscape.

We've accomplished some great things in the first 10 days of our 30-day residency at The Parkside School in Brooklyn (PS 130). The blog network is set up, first graders are making videos that will provide a window into their exciting school lives, we've developed a strong policy for online safety, and a framework for a technology plan is in place.

At PS 124 we're approaching the year-and-a-half point of our media education residency. In that time we've developed a network of blogs that has become known as "The PS 124 Online Learning Network". This group of websites are the foundation of the school's media ed and technology integration program, used for student practice with the Internet and web publishing, archiving of lesson plans, rubrics, and curriculum maps, and as a community resource for general school info and announcements.

Over the past 2 years we've been promoting school blogs as a tool for incorporating media education in the classroom and teaching students safe and responsible online habits. Any talk of blogging or social networking and kids these days doesn't get far without a discussion of online safety. With all the hype around Internet predators and cyber-bullies lurking on blogs and sites like MySpace (enter Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator I, II, or III...") there is (understandably) a lot of resistence to introducing social networking tools into the K-12 environment.

I've always been resistant to the "blog" and "blogosphere" buzzwords. (I'd always say a blog is just a tool that makes it easier to post content to the Net, and the blogosphere is just a subset of content posted to the Net.) But I suppose I'm somewhat of a convert as I've started to rely on these tools myself for work and play (as evidenced by this post itself), and The Media Spot has used blogs to great effect in the classroom.

So it's interesting to see some recent statistics about how the blogging phenomenon is catching on.

Over a 6-day contract with 130 in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood in Brooklyn we set up a free WordPress.com blog, developed and modeled classroom publishing projects for students, got them posting weekly announcements from the office, and helped the staff start to conquer their fear of school technology!

We recently helped long-time TMS friend and colleague Joe Destefano document his annual TV Turnoff on a Wordpress-powered blog.

A high school English teacher at Heritage High in Colorado ran his annual TV Turnoff on a Wordpress-powered blog through consulting with TMS. The TV Turnoff is part of a media studies unit that Mr. D has incorporated into his high school English class for a few years now, but this was the first time that the students' experiences were documented online.

Class 5-302 at PS 124 generated original "list poems" based on a Walt Whitman poem, and adapted them into videos using their class blogs, creative commons, and iMovie.

In case you've missed them, three videos have been posted to the Third Grade Blog at PS124

They are "video illustrations" to student writing projects. Video illustrations help an audience connect to writing, just like a photo or drawing would in a book.