Users. (Tron Tech)

Greetings to all fellow bloggers from the post earthquake habitat of the Northridge valley. My name is Maya Rybak and I am currently a senior at California State University Northridge majoring in English subject matter. My current goal is to graduate and move on from this God forsaken place, but while I am stuck in this miserable wasteland they call the valley I nourish my soul with poetry and variety performance art. This includes aerial stunts, stilt walking, and character work. When I graduated high school I had high hopes of being a teacher, but after much consideration I decided that my talents would be wasted and my dreams would be shot by the LAUSD school system. Although I still have a passion for teaching, I also have a passion for staying reasonably sane well into my 40's. 

Moving on to this weeks blog topic: Media technology and its' role in teaching. I have always been a strong advocate of teaching in a way that is most comfortable to students, even if that means using things such as computers and movies to teach a particular subject. There is a very powerful argument that suggests that students learn better when a subject is introduced through a form such as a movie, powerpoint, social media, music, art form, etc. And I don't look down upon bringing most media technology and practices into the classroom. However, I can't get past the fact that many schools are transitioning to using media technology to educate students. I don't agree with switching students from books to kindles, from library research to internet browsing, or from teacher interaction to computer meditated learning. It takes away a certain work ethic from the students that would otherwise be implemented in their curriculum. I have witnessed plenty of effective uses of media technology as a student, mostly in higher grade level classes, and I think this is attributed to the fact that the students that now learn well though media technology are the same ones who learned well from non media technology methods. Media technology has just made it easier for them to comprehend or "digest" so to speak, the ridiculous amounts of information that they try to process while taking on higher levels of education. Younger students do well with media technology also because they are very comfortable with using the internet and watching television. Do I feel that it's right that we bring it into the classroom? Most definitely not. Are they more comfortable with plagiarizing and staring at a computer screen? Maybe so, but that doesn't mean we should accommodate that in a school environment. Media technology has definitely made it easier for people at all grade levels to make connections and process information faster, but in the same instance I think it has made people lazier and more ignorant when it comes to putting in time and doing work that should or would have otherwise been required of them.