Week 11~ Justifying uses of Digital Tools

The main idea of this article is how to justify using digital media in the classroom. Most classrooms are crunching minutes to get in all the content they are required to teach every day, the addition of media literacy to the curriculum seems almost impossible. Professor Beach feels that we can somewhat combine regular print reading/ writing and media reading/writing to enhance both literacies at the same time. He states: “Given the marginalization of media literacy standards/curriculum in American schools, teachers need to be able to justify the inclusion of digital tools for teaching both print and digital literacies in their classrooms. It is therefore important that teachers, particularly new preservice teachers entering the profession, learn to formulate purposes for use of digital tools to teach print and digital literacies. As teachers increasingly find that employing digital tools in their classrooms does enhance students’ use of both print and digital literacies, they will have the evidence to push for further inclusion of digital tools for teaching media literacies in American schools.” He also states within this comment that new teachers need to formulate purpose of digital tools. He is saying that new teachers have less of a routine and therefore adding something new into their lessons will be easier from the very beginning.  According to the article Media Literacy Across the Curriculum, by David Considine, PhD:  “In reality, teachers, librarians, school media specialists, and students need a common set of skills that will enable them to access, analyze, and evaluate information in any form. Teaching young people to think critically about the Internet is only part of the picture. Those skills need to be applied to all their sources of information, including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, advertising, and film. These media are all part of the communication culture we live in – a fact understood by most English teachers, who now recognize that the term text, once restricted to print media, today includes numerous non-print formats.” Both articles tie in the idea that digital media and media literacy is important in the classroom but in today’s classroom in the “21^st Century” we still have to be clever with when and how we teach it. We have to teach the standards they require but we also need to teach the current life skills to our students using media and digital literacies.