Just recently, I had the opportunity to interview a former afterschool student of mine. Jennifer is in the 8th grade and president of the student counsel. She was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic and been in the United States for 6 years. She has an outgoing personality and eager to learn and loves technology.
Jennifer’s job at the school causes her to be creative and it’s slowly moving her to have a synthesizing mind. However, it is difficult for her to be creative because our district blocks many websites. To add fuel to the fire she expressed her concerns about digital media.
As mention earlier, Jennifer was not born in this country. Speaking English and understanding it is quite challenging. She loved when the math teacher was able to show the students a math problem being taught by another teacher on YouTube. She expressed watching YouTube gave her another strategy to use for the math concepts she was learning. Also, observing digital media allows her to put a face on what she was reading in her text book. Lastly, it helped her with speaking English and understanding it.
The challenge that troubles Jennifer is the lack of digital media. YouTube is not our district’s favorite and the only way she was able to view an assignment was through her teacher’s laptop and the video was projected on the SmartBoard. In addition, Discovery Education is not blocked but it does not allow users to play the video clippings. She expressed her concern; digital media would be a great asset in our school’s community. Having digital media allows’ students to have a discipline mind for projects, a synthesizing mind when you want to extend your knowledge and being creative when the lesson calls for presentations.
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