Recent Podcasts Offer Reflections on Teaching Wisely with Digital Materials

In the past two months, two tech-oriented podcasts have given us an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learned over a decade of focusing on how students can best learn from technology and media. Even though the two of us come from different beginnings—Lisa as a journalist with a focus on education, science, and technology, and Kristina as an elementary school teacher—both of our comments on these podcasts and our work in general emphasizes the importance of empowering and supporting educators and parents so that they, in turn, can empower and support students and children. Instead of focusing on tech first, we prioritize the humans using tech.

On February 26, Kristina was a guest on episode 26 of My Tech Toolbelt, a podcast created and hosted by educator Shannon Tabaldo and Brenda Argano, that specifically lifts up educators using technology in a variety of ways. And on February 27, Lisa was a guest on episode 3 of Your EdTech Questions, a podcast developed this year by the International Society for Technology in Education and hosted by educators Zac Chase and Amal Giknis.

Here’s a quick synopsis of what we talked about:

Kristina: On My Tech Toolbelt, I described my education journey from how I got started as a classroom teacher to when I started to deeply understand how open educational resources (OER) can be powerful tools for teaching and learning. As an early childhood teacher in Omaha, Nebraska, I was teaching using inquiry-based methods and would pull together resources for students as they asked questions and wanted to explore new concepts. As I said in the podcast, “I walked in and had nothing in the classroom - it was a brand-new kindergarten classroom.” Another challenge was that the majority of my students were English Learners working on their language acquisition in addition to content acquisition. Like most educators, I spent countless hours, on weekends and weeknights, looking for additional resources. We were all trying to figure out how to best serve English Learners and make materials available to them in their heritage language, and OER makes it possible to publish translations that a teacher has created without violating copyright.

While completing a graduate program at Pepperdine University on Learning Technologies, a position opened in Nebraska’s state department of education for a digital learning specialist. After four years of providing professional learning across the entire state, I started a fellowship at the U.S. Department of Education that gave me yet more room to help educators leverage instructional materials to support student learning.

Now at New America, I have published a resource for educators and education leaders (from principals to superintendents) to get started in bringing OER to their school districts: PreK-12 OER in Practice, and I continue to visit and support school districts around the country, lifting up stories of what works.

Lisa: On Your EdTech Questions, I delved into the research and on-the-ground examples from years of examining how digital media and interactive technologies affect reading. The book Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens, which I co-authored with Michael H. Levine, now the chief knowledge officer at Sesame Workshop, provides stories from families and classrooms combined with translation of research on what children need to become strong readers. We zoomed in on what we know about how and when digital media can support their language and literacy development—and when it falls short.

A key stimulant for literacy—especially in the early years—is the amount of social interaction and conversation that occurs between children and parents, and students and teachers, and among students and their peers when they are attending to stories and concepts on books or on screen. On the podcast, I explained why it is important to have content in apps and games that provides joint-engagement opportunities in which children and caregivers and teachers can learn and converse together about what they are seeing on the screen. Ensuring that apps, books, games, and videos are rich in content and help develop an understanding of new concepts (in science, history, art, math, and more) can also help build vocabulary and background knowledge, which is important for becoming a strong reader.

In the coming months, both of us will be continue this emphasis on how to equip and empower adults to better support students in the Digital Age. We and other colleagues on our teams at New America are participating in conferences around the country (and the world, including Lisbon, Portugal for the Creative Commons Global Summit, where Kristina and our colleague Sabia Prescott will be speaking on how OER can be leveraged for LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum) about how to examine and promote this human-centered approach to technology. Our next opportunity is at Common Sense Media’s Truth about Tech conference in Washington, D.C., where Lisa will be speaking on April 4th. Stay tuned.

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