A Digital Immigrant Reflects

Wow, "flexible" instructional media. Learning this week was unimaginable. What an interplay between learners’ abilities and the tools they can use. Traditional classroom materials and media, like books and speech, come in “one size”, so to speak, for all, but they do not fit everyone. As a special educator, inflexible media actually create barriers to learning. New classroom media, like digital text, sound, images, and the World Wide Web, can be adjusted to different individuals and their needs, opening not just doors, but windows to learning.

Traditional media for teaching--speech, text, and images--are so ingrained in our methods and curriculum that teachers rarely stopped to consider their use. Instead of thinking carefully about which medium to use in a given situation, teachers usually select what they have chosen in the past or what is convenient. What few teachers recognize is that these media have very different things to offer in the communicative process and we, as teachers, should consider its appropriateness for the particular content or activity. Also, we need to weigh the characteristics of our students. This analysis is not usually a part of how we understand and appraise our students’ capacities, how we teach, and how we evaluate learners’ progress. As a digital immigrant, I can see that we have allowed traditional media to shape our practices. Instead of considering students individually, we operate on a one-size-fits-all mindset. New electronic media offer the opportunity--and I believe it is our obligation--to re-examine old assumptions about teaching media and tools and reconsider the impact on learners.