Interactivity #2

     Through watching the video on the visual history of technology, reading chapter 2 on  “Rethinking Technology in Schools” and through the supplemental reading, I found myself struggling to decide whether my chosen technology had impacted my content area for the better or for the worse. Through this historical context, I have come to the realization that film has been the communication technology that has impacted English the most. Like many other technologies, film seems to have made a crucial impact on English for the better. Through reading about Grace , her experiences with film and those of her mother and grandmother, it is obvious that in some aspects film has had a negative impact in education. First of all, in some ways, principals and other administrators believed that films were less boring substitutes for teachers and that they were more lively ways for students to really learn (Domine 44). However, films were also used in Language Arts and other classes to illustrate correct lip and tongue move­ment for pronouncing words (Domine 45). This could have been especially helpful to English teachers because they could enhance the pronunciation of difficult vocabulary words, while also teaching simple, basic words to newcomers who were learning English.

In the video, I also saw that some of the small clips they made and showed the students were on how to build your vocabulary. Lessons like those can be very helpful to students and can serve as a reinforcement of something already taught. However, like Grace’s grandmother states, it is better to study “film and radio programs as texts to be critically analyzed rather than celebra[te] the machines themselves (Domine 44). In these situations, when films served as supplementary materials to the lesson and not as substitutes for the teachers, I believe they served as beneficial inventions and that the only time when films were negative, was when the administrators tried to substitute the knowledge of a real human for that of a machine. In every other case, like in the creation of programs like Sesame Street, film has had a beneficial impact on technology and on the English classroom. For all this, I believe that as a result of the creation of film, we can now show movies that were created from books like Beowulf, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter and its modern version Easy A, etc… These movies do not teach the students the complete story, but serve to reiterate the plot and as visual forms of what they have learned through reading the original books.

 

 Every good book, must then become a good movie 






Works Cited

Domine, Vanessa. "A Social History of Media, Technology and Schooling." The National Association for Media Literacy Education’s Journal of Media Literacy Education 1 (2009): 42-52. JMLE. Web.

 

Domine, Vanessa. "Rethinking Technology in Schools Primer." New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Print.