Smart Kids: Competencies in the Digital Society Right From the Start

,

Werkstatt.bpb Education Salon

Smart Kids: Competencies in the Digital Society Right From the Start

Werkstatt.bpb Education Salon Smart Kids

Media educator Kristin Narr discussed with teachers and other attending educational players at Werkstatt.bpb‘s Education Salon “Smart Kids” which skills and competencies kids require to safely maneuver in the digital society and how media education at school as well as at home should look like to mediate media literacy.

From early childhood on, kids are surrounded by digital media, be it smartphones, tablets or smart home devices. Growing up as a “Native Digital”, however, does not by itself entail safe and critical-reflective use of digital media – it has to be actively adopted, both at home and in school. Reckoning, assuming and drawing the line between teacher’s educational mandate and parents education responsibility, regulating and teaching children the use of digital media, is nebulous at times, nonetheless.

Unpredictable Developmental Effects

Age dependent stages of media adoption and their influence ranges from simple behavior imitation in early years, over thoughts and action guidance during later personality development stages, to the creation of social (media) groups and networks with independent rules and principles of interaction, participation and in- or exclusion.

Content and method of attraction generation often times draw on immediate and short-term satisfaction and human’s innate addictive mechanisms, pulling people in front of the screen for hours and affecting learning behavior and abilities of adolescent long-term.

Furthermore, independent of the content and context of media use, screen usage in and of itself affects the development of sensory and spatial perception and interaction.

Legal Considerations

Public’s and parents’ general concern about (social) media use revolves around data privacy and exploitation of information for commercial interests, directly targeting children and teenagers. Within the current legal framework of social media platform and app use, another important issue is being aware of the legally liable person in case of infringement of e.g. personal or third-party rights by legally not-liable, underage persons on those platforms: their parents.

Teacher Education

With regard to media literacy, the educational goal is to foster competency. ‘Competency’ means being prepared and able to adequately react and adapt to upcoming and unforeseeable challenges with the current set of skills and knowledge. For teachers to authorize competency and provide children with guidance on how to use digital media in a critical, sovereign and autonomous way, they need to possess adequate media education skills themselves in the first instance. Mediation of media literacy teaching competency to teachers, therefore, needs to be an integral part of teacher education across the board, including didactic, methodology and pedagogy, all teaching subjects and type of schools. Medienpass NRW provides such a media literacy framework and certification system for schools, in order to mainstream media literacy into teachers education in NRW. Gute Schule 2020 is an example for a funding programme from Land NRW and NRW.BANK, providing two billion Euro investments into school infrastructure, including digital infrastructure.

Digital Media for the Good Cause

Leveraging on interests of children at and concerns of parents about digital media and net culture can increase participation in and at education measures, respectively. For children, learning about language and communication, as an example, can be much more interesting and improve classroom participation rates if done at hand of current means and standards of communication, e.g. Emoji Quiz or Medien Knigge. The kind of media where most of students attention is going can also be used to reduce friction in making knowledge accessible, as Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb) does it with its broadcast group ‘Deine tägliche Dosis Politik‘, available on WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram. Marketing teacher-parent media education collaboration the right way, speaking to existing demands and worries of parents, e.g. social media addiction and topics revolving around sex education, can improve parents’ parent-teacher conference participation.

Creative utilization and implementation of new trends for educational purposes does not need to be limited to social media. Teachers can draw on innovations ranging from 3D-printers, age-appropriate and child- and teaching-oriented programming environments (e.g. Scratch.MIT.edu), robotics (incl. drones), hardware (e.g. Raspberry Pi), apps (www.FragFinn.de), to analogous IoT tools.

With regard to the growing importance and significance of MINT studies in the realm of Work 4.0, the next big leap for the educational system ought to be implementing creativity, to harness the vastly untapped educational potential of new technologies and the digital society – progressing from MINT to MINCT.

 

Related Posts