Here's my reflection on this video
I was amazed by some of the facts the video flashed up. 11 hours consuming media? The ways in which I’d like to use this in the classroom are to include more media in my curriculum/instruction. I’m not sure which media or how; however, given that students are spending so much time in front of a screen, it may help them to use it in the classroom as well. I hope to work at a school that embraces technology, eschews censorship, and provides adequate resources for me to use technology in my classroom. Currently, my school site has zero laptops/tablets/chromebooks for students, the internet is too slow to stream videos, and the projector malfunctions frequently. The best I can say for my current situation is that the TV has a VCR. I find this truly inhibiting, and this has made me realize how much I value technology in the classroom.
This video also speaks to a lot of Wagner’s book discusses. The scantrons and rote memorization don’t lead us to real achievement. As the video says, “students guess what the teacher wants them to say.” This leads to “standardization of students,” as the video puts it. It is true that the authorities are no longer the guardians of knowledge, and that students could have the content knowledge we share with them merely by googling. I have a hard time, however, getting students to give me less than standardized answers. Students indeed try to write an answer that they think I would like to see. In fact, some ask me, “what do I write here?” Really, they mean, “what do you want me to write do that I can get an A?” I stress, as the video mentions, the need for students to write what they feel. I try to challenge them to come up with less standardized answers so that in discovering these answers for themselves, they are developing skills of evaluation and appliacton.