My first experience with YouTube happened when I was 11 years old in my math classroom. We were learning about the area and circumference of a circle, and in order to help us remember the formulas, my teacher put on “The Circle Song,” a 3-minute-long YouTube video where someone sings a catchy song that explains the formulas for area and circumference, while images of circular objects flash across the screen. Since that day, I have consistently used YouTube as an educational outlet, and as it has grown tremendously in popularity within the last decade, it is a media platform that is used ever increasingly for educational purposes. YouTube consists of two roles—the viewer and creator, but for this piece, I will focus on the role of the viewer. Continue reading Seeing, Hearing, and Watching Math–A World of Learning through YouTube
Category Archives: Media and Technology Critiques
Instagram: Creative, Engaging & Informative
There are many contradicting opinions about Instagram and its effects on young people. Some studies and opinion pieces have cautioned it’s ability to affect young people’s sense of self worth, while at the same time allowing more opportunities for bullying and harassment to take place without adult supervision. Others, however, see Instagram as an outlet for young people’s self expression and a place for connection, particularly for sexual, gender or racial minority students. Personally, I find elements of both arguments to ring true and believe that by including Instagram (and other media) in the classroom we can lessen the damaging aspects.
Not as popular among adolescents as Snapchat, but more popular than Facebook, Instagram is a mainstay in a majority of young people’s social media deck. Instagram is unique as it’s primary mode of communication is visual. Whether one is scrolling through their main feed or swiping through Instastories, videos and pictures are formatted via the app to take up the majority of a smartphones display frame. Text and tags (hashtag or account/people tagging) can be added to Instagram stories, and captions up to 2,200 characters exist under posts, but at it’s core, Instagram is meant to appeal visually making it a unique and creative form of communication. If one wants to communicate anything of great value or importance on Instagram they need to figure out how to do so in a succinct and efficient manner, making Instagram an useful tool for learning clarity in writing and communication.
As an educational tool, I believe using Instagram in the sexuality education classroom can (1) assist in assessing learning objectives, (2) make content more applicable and (3) enhance media literacy. Instagram is accessible not only through the app but via the web page. Students that don’t have smart phones can still access and post on Instagram via desktop/laptop computer or tablet.In my sexuality education classes for upper and middle grades I propose asking students to create social media campaigns on self selected content related to focus/unit at the time, i.e., puberty, safer sex & birth control options, gender roles, healthy relationships, pleasure, first time sex etc. All of my lessons are inclusive of LGBTQIA+ identities as well as challenge the gender binary. I’d ask student’s to create social media campaigns that are factual, educational and captivating exmp. ‘The clitoris is the only organ in the body whose primary and only function is pleasure’ or ‘Did you know you can have sex while HIV+?’, therefore, assessing learning objectives without using traditional testing methods.
Using a platform adolescents are already familiar with elicits self efficacy and increases confidence in communicating what is learned. Students find agency in choosing from classroom content what they think is most important to them or their community (school, friends etc) to create a campaign about, thus, facilitating connection between content and lived experiences. Additionally, Instagram’s visual format, as mentioned above, not only promotes clarity but allows for creativity. Students who may not do well on written or verbal assignments, may excel at creating a visually captivating campaign that is also factual and concise.
As for enhancing media literacy, creating Instagram sexuality education accounts or campaigns can assist in analyzation of problematic social standards. Social media (and all media) tends to amplify heteronormative and binary gender values. By creating sex positive content students analyze harmful behavioral norms and contribute to the resistance and resilience of sexual, gender and racial minorities.
Buzzfeed as a Tool in the Foreign Language Classroom
Let’s face it, so many of us can say we have had, at some point in our lives, a form of addiction to Buzzfeed, especially when it comes to Buzzfeed quizzes. I mean, I can find out what kind of burger I’d be just by answering 10 questions about what random things I’d prefer? Sign me up! Continue reading Buzzfeed as a Tool in the Foreign Language Classroom
Digital Empowerment: How Students Can Use Twitter to Manage and Challenge their Representations
As I started browsing through social media platforms, I became interested in exploring how teenagers use Twitter. At first, I wasn’t too familiar with how teenagers use the social media platform. But according to the Pew Research Center (Anderson & Jiang, 2018), teenagers now use Twitter more frequently than Facebook. MacArthur’s article (2018) that highlights the use of social media for black girls’ empowerment also caught my attention, since he describes how these students use social media to fight against stereotypes, partial stories about their misrepresentation, and other institutional inequalities that exist in their own communities. As a woman of color, and a future Spanish teacher in the United States, I became very inspired after reading a Twitter campaign that rallied against the injustices in a school. The campaign was led by a female black student as part of an empowerment program that uses social media to promote media literacy. As I reevaluate the use of Twitter in my classroom, I want to explore different ways I can incorporate it in my lessons to relearn about what kinds of discourse is narrated in Spanish speaking cultures.
As a platform, Twitter has made a difference around the world by enabling its users to promote political and social campaigns. It allows people from different socioeconomic backgrounds to work together towards a mutually-shared belief or vision. As adolescents start using social media, they realize that people are watching them; they become aware that their own friends are following what they are doing.
Re-purposing Twitter for positive and impactful changes in the classroom can be difficult. Once a tweet is out in the world it cannot be edited; therefore, users have to more careful about what they express to the world. Since teenagers are still developing their own identities and image, they want to be seen by their friends while they are judging each other. However, I think Twitter can be a more powerful platform because it is based less on physical appearance than doing something “cool.”
As I think through activities to reuse Twitter in my classroom, one teaching example comes to mind. The misrepresentations and stereotypes that media creates about Spanish-speaking cultures. One activity I can think of is to search for different representations of from a wide arrange of Spanish-speaking nationalities in Twitter. This type of activity can be introduced when we are discussing the misrepresentations of women in Latin American culture. For example, looking for #peruvians, #colombians, #dominicans. We can start by exploring first what kind of media images are shared about those nationalities and understand the similarities and differences. For the second activity, we can add #peruvianwoman, #colombianwoman, #dominicanwoman, and see if it makes a difference to express what’s out there for woman’s representation. For the last part, we can start thinking about if there are more positive or negative things as we do the search and analyze why this happens and compare how women are represented in American culture. For the final project, I will have each student advocate for a topic that they find important to illustrate women’s achievements in Latin America and create a #hashtag campaign that promotes positive representations of women and their successes from the past or present in Latin America. Each student or group of students will choose a country.
Empowering students from different backgrounds to use Twitter for social media campaigns can be a powerful tool. It allows students to rethink what they can do for their own communities that may feel misrepresented. Because Twitter is based on creativity instead of physical appearances, I believe that it is a more effective and powerful medium for students to re-create and re-conceptualize how they are represented by the print and digital media.
One drawback I can see from doing this activity is that these types of changes may not be enough to motivate students to replicate this activity in their own communities, and if they do, that it will not go beyond Twitter. In that case, students may feel powerless to be able to create any changes. For that reason, we have to recognize that Twitter is just a start to change the discourse. Students must organize themselves and engage in social and political change beyond Tweets. Being able to communicate the importance of these activities to other teachers in the school could make a difference to start developing critical and inquisitive minds in our students.
References
McArthur, S. A. (2016). Black girls and critical media literacy for social activism. English Education, 48(4), 362-379.
Anderson, Monica & Jinjing Jiang (May 31, 2018). Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018. Washington D.C.: Retrieved from the Pew Research Center:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-technology-2018/
Video-Columns: Satirical Journalism
I studied journalism. Life showed me the path into teaching, but I’ve always found a way to flirt with it. Incorporating it into teaching, has felt appropriate in many cases, but in the project I will attempt to explain in this post, it felt more than appropriate, it felt right!
This project titled Video-Columnas (Opinion Columns on Video), was carried out with 8th grade students from a school in Bogota, Colombia for the Spanish Language and Literature, native speakers of Spanish. It was replicated in the English Language and Literature class of 10th grade, for Students who were ELLs in a Transitioning or Expanding level (High intermediate or advanced) with similar outcomes. For New York City urban schools, and other similar contexts, I’d love to see it in action in Heritage Speakers classes, or in International High schools. Continue reading Video-Columns: Satirical Journalism