Thoughts on the Digital Media Report

After just finishing reading this report about the youth and digital media, I found it to be very eyeopening. I know younger and younger children are becoming more and more technologically savvy, but it is still hard for me to grasp. I can only just think about when I was a child and compare my childhood experience to the limited amounts of technology that we had. Now, at the school I am teaching in, we have two technology teachers. The staff tries to integrate technology into the curriculum as much as possible and I am amazed at what whizzes our students are at the computer.

The thing I found the most interesting in the report was that the teaching of the new medias is done more through student to student, than teacher to student. In a way then, the teaching of technologies should be more focused on the younger grades and then gradually released the the students as they get older. There are so many new social networking sites and programs that it is extremely hard to keep up. Of course, there is facebook and myspace, but now they have twitter and something I think called chat roulette. I'm only 22 and even I can barely keep up with all the new things happening on the internet.

After reading the report it really started to make me think about nowadays friendships. Since more and more children are turning to social networking, instant messaging, and texting, how are they developing the proper social skills for today's society and workplace? Yes, they see their friends at school, but when they go home, what do they do? They go on their computers or play video games, completely isolating things. It is not often that I hear from my students, "Name came over to my house last night to play and hang out." The only thing I really hear is, "Mr. Heber, I went home last night and played video games until I went to bed," or, "Mr. Heber I went on website last night. You make up a person and then you go around and talk to people." I was really taken aback when I heard that my fourth graders were going into online chatrooms. Granted, these chatrooms are meant for children but I couldn't help but think of online predators. The world is becoming a lot smaller because of the internet and it should be our goal as educators to teach the proper skills and knowledge needed for this technologically based society.