New Media

To me, New Media encorporates the wide variety of digital media students engage in today. Blogging, texting, emailing, video games. podcasting, and a variety of other communication mediums fall under the New Media heading. My students, even at the second grade level, encounter media in a variety of ways in their daily lives. In my classroom, we use regularly use the internet for emailing and research. In their home lives, they use the internet to IM friends, play video games (for hours) and download music to their iPods.
Although I try to utilize the technology available in my school to encorporate New Media in my teaching, I often find that we have "technical difficulties" and either cannot access the internet because the network is down, or our equiptment is broken. In addition, the equiptment we do have, is just not maintained well enough to last. This year, we had increased access to SmartBoards and there were several boards and projector carts available for teacher use in each wing of our school. However, the boards and carts were so large that I could barely fit them in my classroom! I know that I was not the only one that felt that way because at the end of the year the boards and carts were completely covered in dust!
Sometimes I think that districts purchase items just to show the parents that they are utilizing technology, but there is little thought given to the logistics of the classroom. In addition, no investment is made to educate teachers on how to use this new technology in a meaningful way. Therefore, I find my ability to tap into the "New Media" my students engage in, has to be relegated to homework assignments that are optional like accessing certain sites to read information about a subject we are studying. One assignment that I had the students complete this year was to write a review of a video game that they enjoyed playing at home. The students really enjoyed this assignment and I would have liked students to have been able to bring in the games to show the class, but the equiptment was out for repairs that week.