Using Television In The Classroom

Today's students are growing up in a highly visualized world. Television, video games, and DVDs offer powerful visual images to attract the attention of children and young adults. Unfortunately for educators, the technology in the classroom is yet to catch up. Is it possible to use this exciting visual technology, which is so familiar to students, to benefit learning and education? Cameras in the Classroom brings all those possibilities to life. Filled with sound research and helpful tips, this book explains why there's such a need for visual learning and why an estimated one million teachers will be using video production over the next few years. Cameras in the Classroom offers practical advice for educators on the application of visual learning in schools, replacing archaic word-based teaching techniques with the visual competencies, how to incorporate videomaking into traditional K-12 subjects with limited resources, and more!

Little attention has been given to the potential of video recorders and cameras in children's learning. This book attempts to counteract such neglect by giving examples of good practice based on classroom experience.

Includes activities for children to use to be more informed television viewers for grades K-8.

How ed tech was born: Twentieth-century teaching machines--from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to "go at their own pace" did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas--bite-sized content, individualized instruction--that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning. Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media--newspapers, magazines, television, and film--in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the "pre-verbal" machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include "Autodidak," "Instructomat," and "Autostructor.") Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls "the teleology of ed tech"--the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.