Smart Mobs: News in the classroom
- Quote: “More US teachers are using online news sites in the classroom, leaving behind newspapers that fail to grasp the internet’s importance in trying to reach students, a study has found,”news reports.”Fifty-seven per cent of American teachers use internet-based news in the classroom with some frequency, said the study, which was based on a survey of 1262 teachers in years five to 12 in the northern autumn of 2006, and released on Monday by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education. The figure compares with 31 per cent for national television news, and 28 per cent for daily papers. Local television news, at 13 per cent, was at the bottom of the list, the study found. “Students do not relate to newspapers at all, any more than they would to vinyl records,” one teacher said in the study. The findings reflect a wider trend in the United States of falling circulation and advertising revenue at many daily papers as people go online for news and entertainment”.
Note: As a former journalist, I still feel somewhat sad about the demise of papers. But it can’t compete with the global, self-organized news we can consume online. Here is the link to the original article.
– post by willrich
I posted on my blog today about a lecture I heard recently by Molly Ivins about how the web is affecting newspapers and her views about what papers should do about it.
She was concerned also that the profit margins of traditional papers, which didn’t used to be that high but rose in the 80’s and 90’s, are now lowering again, so the conglomerates are selling them off and reducing reporters and relying instead on “headline” type of news.(gleaned from the internet) and consequently their sales continue to drop.
Ironically–she felt that they should be focusing on in depth reporting and analysis and independence (reminded me of what blogging has become).
Anyway, it was an interesting lecture. It seems the papers that do well and that we turn to are still the ones that provide more analysis…
A former journalist myself, I empathize with the situation facing today’s newspapers. However, the fact is that technology has made me impatient–I seek immediacy. As a teacher in an increasingly technoliterate district, I embrace the power of online news and the fashion in which it and the SmartBoard can bring global issues into the classroom with economy both in words and in dollar signs: no having to place orders in advance, or collecting money to cover costs, or writing paper trails of invoices. And no trash to dispose of when the day is done, the discussion finished, and what was new is old.
I remember when I was growing up as a child, at the end of the day my parents would sit in their recliners and each read through the day’s newspaper to find out “current events.” That was so long ago and so much has changed! Reading a newspaper at the end of the day now leaves one finding out about what is going on in the world at least 24 hours behind! With online news sources so accessible, information and news are at our fingertips now while they unfold. It is not surprising that internet-based news is used so frequently in the classroom. I imagine internet-based learning will continue to expand and that eventually textbooks will be nearly completely replaced with internet-based readings.
As a middle school teacher, I still use newspapers as a tool to teach skills. I use many online news resources and often check throughout the day with the students to see what is happening around the world while we sit in class.
Through Newspapers in Education, I use the newspaper as a means for practicing analysis of primary source documents. Usually on Fridays we pick through the newspaper looking for an informational graphic, political cartoon, letter to the editor, an article and a photograph. This is something that can be done on the internet, yes. But with limited access to the labs in the school buildings, the free newspapers that we receive have been a great resource. The students read the sports or the comics or do sudoku when they are finished.
I have my students in front of technology more than any other teacher in my building and have found that the students aren’t as averse to using the newspapers as one may think, but are far from achieving the stated goal of the NIE program to “‘create a generation of news junkies’ who will always have a thirst for information”. Print is just not going quench the thirst for much as the information source for this generation.