Learning and Leading - February 2009

Interactive. Interactivity is a characteristic of dynamic media that is a key to educational use. This allows users to change and control media on the fly, permitting them to manipulate parameters and move among representations in nonlinear fashion.

Multilayered. Dynamic media frequently include video, animations, audio, data, graphs, and other representations layered on top of one another.

Mobile. Dynamic media are increasingly mobile and ubiquitously available to users on smartphones, Blackberries, iPods, and other mobile media players. Dynamic media are frequently repurposed for different form factors, from wide-screen televisions to cell phones and mobile media players.

The dynamic nature of media makes teaching in more dynamic ways possible, to engage students and facilitate inquiry inside schools.

Teaching with Dynamic Media

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy stepped from a black-and-white Kansas landscape into a vibrant Technicolor world. In the same way, dynamic use of digital sound, images, video, and animation can transform a classroom. In social studies, students are incorporating online primary source documents into short digital docu-mentaries. Math teachers are using dynamic media to demonstrate connections among multiple representations. In science, visualization tools allow learners to see patterns in data that allow them to interpret underlying phenomena.

Google Earth provides a good ex-
ample of this use. Its three-dimensional
viewing capability makes it possible to
tilt, zoom, and interactively fly through
the terrain. For many students, tradi-
tional maps are only a two-dimension-
al pattern of colors. The site Teaching
Geology in the 21 Century provides
st

a description of ways in which Google Earth can be used in teaching.

Characteristics of Dynamic Media

Characteristic Remixable Shareable

Social Interactive Multilayered Mobile

Cultural Characteristics

Technical Characteristics

Google Earth illustrates many of the characteristics of dynamic media. It is interactive, allowing users to move through the landscape. It supports layering, allowing additional information and markers to be placed on top of the base layer. It has a movie-maker feature that makes it possible to record the three-dimensional imagery and save the recording as a movie file. The resulting movies can be shared, linked, and embedded. It is mobile— there is a version of Google Earth for the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

This allows instructors to move from a static, two-dimensional approach to teaching to a dynamic, 3D approach. It allows them to interact with a class and respond to questions on the fly to facilitate inquiry.

Student Engagement and Participation

In studies conducted across several content areas and grade levels, including science, mathematics, and social studies, we have found that effective use of dynamic media can lead to increased student engagement. As a new digital generation becomes increasingly comfortable using these tools to communicate and interact, teachers will have the opportunity to allow students to remix media.

Lawrence Lessig’s most recent book, Remix, comments on the educational potential of this aspect of dynamic media:

Remix is a strategy to excite

“interest-based” learning. As the name suggests, interest-based learning is learning driven by found interests. When kids get to do work that they feel passionate about, kids (and, for that matter,

Description
Media can be remixed and recombined
Media can be exported and linked
Media can facilitate ongoing conversations
User interactions are supported
Multiple layers of media are incorporated
Ubiquitous on media players, phones

adults) learn more and learn more effectively.

Lessig notes that teachers like Elizabeth Daley and Stephanie Parrish, while working in inner-city schools,

…saw classes of students who before could not retain their focus for a single class period now spending every free moment of every hour the school was open editing and perfecting video about their lives, or stories they want to tell.

Teachers are beginning to use this approach to extend traditional essays and engage students.

Engaging the Senses

Teachers who employ dynamic media effectively must have the ability to use audio editors, video editors, social media, and applications specific to their discipline. They must also possess a deep knowledge of content and associated instructional strategies to discern how dynamic media can be employed most effectively.

Dynamic media can move us into a world that engages the senses through images, sound, video, and animation. Teachers with the necessary skills can employ these media to teach more dynamically, and it is encouraging to report that teachers often do just that when given the opportunity.