Digital Fail

After the first few readings we did for my new graduate class in Theory and Practice: Teaching New Media and Literacies, I was hit with a variety of emotions-- I felt empowered, curious, and maybe just a little overwhelmed. My students this year all have laptops -- was I wasting a valuable resource in lieu of the "old fashioned" methods of instruction? Was the growing disengagement in my classrooms the result of worse students, or archaic teaching practices? Faced with emotional overload, I took to Facebook and polled my friends and family. My question was as follows:

I wasn't prepared for the 32 comments that followed in the coming day. Overwhelmingly, my friends and family realized that the majority of the reading and writing they do in the working world is through digital means. They suggested that their teachers had not prepared them for this part of their careers, and that it would be interesting if teachers today could do just that. (A few of my older family friends also reprimanded me for not teaching grammar to the no-good, comma-misplacing hooligans of today, but that's another story).

Feeling like a media literacy pioneer, I set out to digitize my classroom. The next day, I required students to sign up for a Google account so that they could all access and collaborate on the same document on Google Drive. Some students signed up for an account in a minute, then found themselves completely unable to focus on the next task they were to work on as I spent the following 20 minutes trying to help out the students who had been locked, out asked for a verification phone number, or just generally unable to work the internet intuitively. Finally, though, we were all signed up (well, mostly).

That night, I got an impassioned email from a houseparent (I teach at a residential school) suggesting that I had wandered into dangerous territory that might conflict with one of the school's policies by having students make email accounts. However, they wanted to help me legitimize my new project and get it approved by all the right channels.

I decided to deliver a very impassioned reply myself and espoused the many ideals of digital media literacy we have been reading about in the past week. The houseparent jumped on board and thanked me for my dedication to students. Win!

The next day, my optimistic bubble had been refilled, and I set about having students collaborate on the document. It was slow going, the students' excitement quickly turned into disruption, and we barely got anything accomplished. I felt like giving up on the whole enterprise. Then, slowly but surely, I started to pick up the reins and figure out how I needed to scaffold (and constrain) this collaborative mini-project. One the students knew what I expected, and I had modeled it fully and effectively, the students were hooked. I even had a student log online over the weekend and start filling in a document we were going to use in class the next day! Can you imagine?

A collaborative brainstorming document edited by my Honors English class

In The Socially Networked Classroom, Kist describes the "sometimes messy first steps of educators who are attempting to include social networking inside real schools and who are grappling with all the challenges that come along with this new kind of teaching" (7). It's important to remember, I suppose, that Rome wasn't built in a day, and that I won't become a digital literacy whiz overnight. The payoff will be worth all the struggle-- at least, that's what I keep telling myself!