It is important to understand that the world is constantly changing, our children are learning every day new things that most adults arent able to keep up with. Technology is advancing at such a quick rate it is hard to keep track of what can and cannot be done in the classroom anymore. In many of the schools i have volunteered and shadowed in in the last couple years every one had white board or even smart boards instead of chalk boards, fully functioning computer projectors instead of the old overhead projectors that only showed translucent images. And now instead of having to go down to the AV department, order in advance a TV and VCR, have them wheeled into the room and then taken out after their use, we now have TVs and DVD players in every classroom or at least have DVD capability for the digital projectors.
We have come to an age where we have to embrace technology as a huge influence in our lives, imagine if tomorrow there was no cell phones, tv, digital cameras, or computers, we have seen it before, most of us grew up in a time where these things were just starting out or just taking on public consumption. But imagine if they were gone, we would be lost. We have adapted ourselves to a life with technology, we have weaved these devices into our everyday lives that we have become dependent on them.
So what should a teacher do in this new technologically dependent society? Refuse to change and teach through a book and nothing else. Or embrace ever advancing world and apply these new mediums of teaching into your curriculum. Here are some ways to use TV in a class.
For Language arts it is helpful to choose books that have a movie or tv show based off of it for the students to read. This way after they finish the book the students have a chance to reiterate the knowledge they gained from their reading and may even pick up on themes, plot devices, and certain kinds of character development that they didnt understand fully while reading.
In science it is important that students have a visual representation or demonstration of what they are learning. In this case it would be significantly helpful to have the students learn a couple lessons such as about th human anatomy from an episode of the magic schoolbus, it helps because then the students are getting the information orally and visually so that later when they go over the same information in the text they have a visual to help drive the point further in their mind.
It is our job as teachers to know our students, and teach them with the best of our and their abilities and this means giving them all the opportunities to learn that are available. We live in a world of technological dependence, it is about time we learn to embrace it and integrate it into our classrooms.
