Digital Content in the Classroom

 The Library of Congress contains 130 million items to include books, recordings, photographs, music items, and manuscripts. These items require approximately 530 miles of bookshelves! According to the University of California Berkley, as of 2002 the Internet was estimated to contain enough information to fill 37,000 Libraries of Congress! (Maloy 114). Having so much information at one's fingertips seems like a double-edged sword. The answers to all life's questions are open to everyone with a keyboard, but who makes sure it's the right answer? Does someone fact check the Internet? Who owns the information on the Internet? Can teachers effectively integrate the multitude of digitally based content into their classroom safely and legally?

Bill Nye's Climate Lab

The Internet is unfiltered, largely unregulated, and therefore has inadequacies, misinformation, and various bias. However, for the information literate teacher the Internet is a wealth of digital content that can enhance the learning environment by bringing a subject to life. Certain websites (repositories of like information on the "World Wide Web") can act as a sort of digital field trip (Maloy 159). An art class can explore works of art that are currently scattered throughout various galleries throughout the world on Artcyclopedia.com. Students in a geography class can have digital maps of varying scale and detail available for instant recall from sites like the University of Texas at Austin Perry-Castanada's Library Map Collection or Google's satellite driven GoogleEarth. Science classes can use videos from YouTube (a user-based video hosting site) to watch a chemical reaction, experiment, or dissection. Many learning sites, like Bill Nye's Climate Lab, have educational mini-games that teach the players about conservation, ecology, and citizen science. Using this digitally based content allows teachers to really make a subject come alive, and involve the students in a way that watching a video or lecturing can't do.

As digital material continues to become more widely available and include more and more educationally based material, teaching students (and other teachers) to access it safely and utilize it effectively becomes important. School-based computers may limit what sites a student can access through customized web-browsers. Teachers may discourage students from using information from certain sites by refusing to accept those sites as citations for research papers (Maloy 133). According to Maloy's Transforming Learning with New Technologies (2010) information literacy is defined by the American Library Association as "the ability to recognize when information is needed and  to then have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the  needed information" (p114). Previously the need for information literacy may have seemed to be negligible: educational material came from textbooks that were approved by the school board and a teacher taught primarily from the textbook.

As the Internet becomes prolific enough to threaten the livelihood of textbooks teachers end up needing to evaluate their digitally based additions as they would a student. Is the information relevant? Is the information accurate? Does the medium (video, audio, mini-game, tweet, blog, etc) detract from the overall lesson? Is the teacher permitted to use the material in class as-is, or do they need written permission? Some sites list on their website what form of copyright they hold over their information. All digital media is automatically copyrighted to the author the moment it's fixed in medium (the Internet) but certain laws and provisions govern when they can be reproduced. Streaming videos, playing music, looking at images "live" from the Internet (through an overhead connected to an Internet-connected computer) are all allowed (Hoon p5-6) and are considered being used "as intended". In fact, digital copyright is a hot-button topic as of 2012 and will be addressed in part two of this blog: Reinforcing Ethics: The Risk of Digital Theft.


Citations: 

Maloy, Robert W., et al. Transforming Learning with New Technologies. Boston: Pearson, 2011. Print.

Hoon, Peggy. "Using Copyrighted Works in Your Teaching—FAQ: Questions Faculty and Teaching Assistants Need to Ask Themselves Frequently" J.D. Washington DC: Association of Research Libraries. KnowYourCopyrights.org. 2007. Web.20 Sep. 2011. <http://www.knowyourcopyrights.org/bm~doc/kycrfaq.pdf>