Teaching in the age of YouTube

In his article "Video Killed the Faculty Star" Jack Stripling discusses how YouTube has changed the nature of education and how teachers have to be very weary of what they say. I find this article to be very scary since I plan on being a teacher eventually.

In the article Stripling discussed a teacher who was caught on film railing against his students who don't believe in global warming. What the video doesn't show is that this was only half of the lecture and in the other half shows the professor arguing against the students who do believe in global warming. The camera operator edited the video to show the teacher in a negative light. This lecture is actually an example of how good the teacher is. He's able to take both sides of the argument and help the students develop their opinions and counterpoints to what he says. The video however shows him as a tree hugging nut who can't accept other points of view.

These videos are worrying for a couple reasons. Teachers don't want to be shown in a bad light because their jobs depend on student, parent and administrative trust that they are actually educating the students. It's hard to have that trust when you see a video that supposedly shows a teacher abusing their power to further their own points of view. The other reason this is so troubling is that a classroom is supposed to be a safe environment. If a student or teacher can't feel free to express their opinions because of fear that those opinions will get out into the larger world then dialogue can come to a standstill. Students won't want to share their opinions in class, the teacher will have a harder time getting them to answer questions and the whole structure can break down.

Is the Internet Good for Us?

We've been reading a lot of articles about how the Internet is a bad thing for various reasons. There's the argument that it cuts off human interactions, that our attention spans are shortening because we move from page to page, article to article with such speed that when put into a regular classroom that doesn't have that speed kids get bored.

I personally think that the Internet doesn't cut off communication between humans to an extent that should be worried about. Various programs (AIM, Skype, and now Google Hangouts) allow for much more communication. I personally don't like talking on the phone all that much, but my friends and I will use Google Hangout in order to video chat with a group of 5 or more people all at once. It's nice to have that function because my friends and I all live in different states, and if we didn't have the internet we wouldn't talk as much.

The attention span thing is a bit worrying. I personally find myself getting bored with things after a certain amount of time. It used to be that I was able to read for an hour/hour and a half straight, but now I get distracted and look things up on my phone or my computer very easily. I agree that attention spans aren't what they used to be, but is that really a problem? In schools I think that teachers should create lessons that get kids up and moving around, and have different parts to them so that the kids can finish one part and then be pulled into the next because it changes the way it's done, the topic, or both. If a kid is sitting there listening to a 50 minute lecture on the Civil War of course they're going to get bored. Who wouldn't? If you make the lecture interactive, asking questions, stopping to answer questions, giving kids something to actually do other than listen it will greatly improve the lesson and their ability to pay attention. Of course, there's the study from one of the articles that shows that even when kids are distracted with toys they still retained the same amount of relevant information that the kids who were paying attention retained.

I personally think that the internet is a good thing. It opens doors of communication and connection, keeps you in touch with people that might have otherwise left your life, and allows research to be done faster. I think that students need to know how to actually go to a library and figure out how to look up books, but since the internet was invented we have access to many more articles and sources that would have otherwise been overlooked.

First Blog Post

First post here. More to follow.