According to the Kaiser Family Foundation report, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, my students spend an average of about 7 hours a day on various media sources. This includes tv, computers, video games, internet, cell phones, etc. At first, I found that hard to believe. I mean, 7 hours? Really? They can't even pay attention to a classroom activity for 15 minutes! How do they focus on media sources for seven hours??? However, As I sit in a technology classroom, trying to multi-task listening to the lesson, reading BBC news, checking Facebook, and clicking on various science links, I realize how easy it is to waste unimaginable lengths of time doing basically nothing.
For my students, and for my teaching, this means that I need to make my lessons and activities accessible to monkeys with very short attention spans. Activities need to be flashy, funny, and yet still fact-filled (alliteration! woohoo! 10 points for me!). I also realize that if I can get students physically engaged, they won't be as distractable - ie, labs, explorations, webquests.
In the end, what this study told me is that we are moving more and more to an interweb-based society, and students are being trained to think, process, and act online. If my teaching can't keep up, then there is no hope for actually teaching science!
Christy,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your assessment of the study. My students are very distract-able in class and if my teaching doesn't capture their imagination, they will just tune me out or go online with their phones. I wish that as I talked, I could beam my thoughts (that overrode all other apps they had) into their phones or iPods so that if they didn't want to listen to me, they would be forced to read the content on their phones :)
Not only are we moving toward an interweb-based society, students (monkeys) are multi-tasking more than ever. The activities and lessons need to appeal to them on several different levels (thought-provoking, visually interesting, kinesthetic, etc). As attention spans get shorter and shorter (thanks Twitter!) we need to find ways to deliver little nuggets of info that captures their imagination.
Hmmm. So that's what you're doing back there.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with a lot of the author's findings, but the article is interesting and a good read, if you can stick with it to the end: In Defense of Distraction.
Both you and Halyna assume that the time-slicing (which I prefer to "multi-tasking") trend will continue. Do you as teachers have a role to address it? I am asking this question in most of my responses to the postings on this topic: Do you think schools should embrace this phenomenon, or should schools be "unmediated" quiet spaces that emphasize face-to-face interactions?
jd
Funny, I sometimes feel like a big bird feeding babby birds, first chewing up the data or info and then spitting it, sometimes by force, into thier mouths for consumption. I suppose I mean, the nuggets of good stuff floating in the mash of the not so good stuff. That said, I've been moving to keeping learning activites uder 15 mintues as my students have the attention spans of goldfishes.
ReplyDeleteJH