A television producer once asked a teacher, "What is the ultimate classroom?" The producer was thinking in terms of technology and envisioned television sets, VCRs, and computers.
The teacher answered, "Unlimited airfare for every child. Whenever someone asks a question about the world, we can all go see." The teacher was thinking in terms of what it means to learn.
Couch Potatoes or Active Learners?
Television has long provoked controversy among many educators. Watching television at school is, at worst, a numbing substitute for real teaching and, at best, a window on dramatic events, such as moon landings and election-year debates. Perhaps our thinking about television is still mired in the 1950s, when TV was a limited medium controlled by a handful of programmers and directed at a passive mass audience.
Television content and production techniques have changed profoundly in the last half century, as have education theory and practice. Indeed, the producer's and the teacher's points of view are not so far apart: Both speak to issues of access and equity, of common goals and individual needs. The producer, recognizing the power of moving images and sound, wanted teachers to have access to the best of what contemporary television offers. The teacher wanted a magic carpet to conjure the world for her students, a way of offering 25 or 30 disparate minds concrete experiences that connect to curriculum content.
Might television be an educationally and fiscally sound way of harnessing the magic that differentiates schooling from learning? Russell Bennett (1998), a teacher at Laurel Elementary School in Brea, California, turned to Bill Nye the Science Guy on PBS to reach a reluctant 4th grader. There was an extremely shy boy in my class who never spoke out loud or participated in group activities. His self-esteem seemed low, and this, unfortunately, resulted in very poor grades. Then one day he checked out a video about electricity and magnetism. I was stunned when this same shy boy volunteered to demonstrate an electromagnet he had made to the class. (P. 14)
Teachers like Russell Bennett are discovering that television can be a source of information and ideas—instead of a distraction. A growing body of evidence says that turning a casual medium into purposeful viewing produces astonishing results.
A recent study showed that children ages 10–12 who viewed television news videos remembered more about five stories than did their counterparts who received print versions (Van der Molen & Van der Voort, 1997). This research echoes the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's extensive analysis of the role of television. Seventy-five percent of teachers surveyed said that students comprehend better and discuss ideas more actively when video is used. Sixty-three percent said that television increases motivation and enthusiasm for learning. Fifty-five percent cited improvements in students with learning disabilities; 59 percent said that economically disadvantaged students learn better when they watch television. The Public Broadcasting study also affirms the shift in thinking about how to use television in classrooms. Television is now more purposefully linked to curriculum than in past studies (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1998).
One thoughtful study, "Television and the Informational and Educational Needs of Children" (Huston & Wright, 1998), provides convincing evidence that—contrary to popular notions about television—educational programming aimed at children has positive effects on school readiness in early childhood and on performance in high school English, science, and math.
Other studies point to such phenomena as lower drop-out rates among at-risk students. Over a four-year period in the Carrollton County School District in Georgia, the drop-out rate declined from 24 to 3 percent. The decline is attributed to the installation of televisions, VCRs, networked computers, and peripherals in classrooms (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997).
Barbara Thomson, a professor of education at Ohio State University, is not surprised that students learn when quality educational television supports the curriculum (personal communication, Sept. 27, 1998). For Thomson, an enthusiastic disciple of Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligences, television plays a key role in serving diverse learning styles. Its presence provokes consideration of the use of multiple intelligence models and consideration for the varieties of learning styles. . . . You see it in responses from underachieving students. In her professional development courses for teachers at the Regional Center for Learning and Teaching Styles at Ohio State University, Thomson engages in-service teachers in thinking about what television can do in classrooms.
New Resources for Learning
With the creation of Cable in the Classroom in 1989, the cable industry embraced two essential ideas put forward by educators that have guided the shift toward more use of active television. First, teachers are instructional decision makers. They look for educational resources that can be readily adapted to meet individual student needs and can address curriculum standards, which increasingly call for in-depth, inquiry-based activities. Second, the scheduling and copyright restrictions of traditional television must be removed for educational programs to comfortably fit into classroom life.
Cable in the Classroom offers eligible schools free cable connections and free basic monthly cable service. The service is available to K–12 schools, public and private, that are state approved, have 25 or more students, and are serviced by cable. When cable cannot reach a school, PrimeStar, a Cable in the Classroom affiliate member, may be able to install satellite equipment at no charge. Most important, the Cable in the Classroom service comes with no strings attached—classrooms have no viewing requirements. Currently, more than 80,000 schools across the country have access—usually through cable installed in the school media center—to more than 500 hours of commercial-free educational programming every month.
By setting aside airtime for commercial-free, curriculum-relevant programs and by providing schools with free access to cable service, Cable in the Classroom member networks and cable companies have assured teachers of a free source of lively, timely learning tools. Accompanying support materials, often created and tested by classroom teachers, offer teachers and students opportunities to expand television's educational potential. For example, at the Discovery Channel Internet site (http://discoveryschool.com), students can prepare to view a program about the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten by listening to the pronunciation and contextual definitions of selected vocabulary words. Teachers can download lesson plans and ideas to accompany History Channel programming at http://www.HistoryChannel.com, and students can access primary source materials at the site's audio archive of historical speeches.
The best television programming is of little use to teachers or students if it isn't available when the curriculum calls for it. Copyright clearances grant teachers extended off-air taping rights for Cable in the Classroom programs. These clearances provide teachers with the gift of time: time to preview programs that have been videotaped and to locate those segments that best fit their needs; time to fully integrate the program into lesson plans; and time to connect the program to other activities, such as a visit from a guest speaker or class participation in an online event.
The VCR also helps teachers avoid the barriers of real-time viewing and turns television into a form of publishing. With devices as simple as a VCR, a remote control, and a television monitor, teachers command the content of the screen. They can customize content to introduce concepts, pose questions, illustrate terms, and inspire debate. The VCR makes it simple to record, archive, circulate, and use television programming to support learning.
Classroom Journeys
Real-world examples reveal how innovative approaches to cable TV take students on lively learning journeys.
In Ohio, a 4th grade class used episodes of Nickelodeon's Mr. Wizard's World to help prepare for state proficiency tests. Students became so engrossed that they created their own science video. In Lincoln, Nebraska, a place known for severe weather, 4th graders used knowledge from The Weather Channel Classroom to construct a weather station and a weather safety kit for their school.
The History Channel Classroom's presentation about Ellis Island prompted 7th graders in Massachusetts to reenact the immigration experience in their school's gymnasium, complete with registration, testing, and medical examination stations. Teachers at a pretrial detention facility in Wisconsin used the USA Network's Erase the Hate programs to spark interest in reading and writing. By the end of the unit, even the guards were bringing in books for the kids.
Today, creative teachers are discovering new presentation techniques. They are redefining television's role and examining how it can be used in concert with digital media. The teachers are in charge and determine suitability, timing, and acceptability to meet curriculum standards.
Inspiring Connections
Over and over, teachers describe two new realities. First, students live in a world saturated with media and are no longer content to learn exclusively from books, lectures, and chalkboards. And second, according to an early study of CNN Newsroom, television creatively used for presentation leads to more reading (Rockman, Burkart, & Ittelson, 1992). These two notions may strike many as contradictory. But in the television-rich classroom, where students are inspired by what they see and hear, reading and viewing go hand in hand.
For example, a 3rd grade class in Hawaii used excerpts from CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, and Knowledge TV programming to learn about social organization and economics. The class subsequently established its own society, complete with laws, currency, jobs, and businesses.
Creative applications of television apply beyond the traditional curriculum and help teachers address social and emotional factors that affect student learning and achievement. Denise Saindon, a teacher at Tewksbury Memorial High School in Massachusetts, was troubled by verbal and physical abuse among students. She used Court TV's Getting Physical, which covered a nearby murder trial involving teens, to rivet students' attention on the potential consequences of abusive behavior. Saindon also connected students to the community. By bringing a teen advocate and a court representative from a battered women's shelter to class, Saindon made the issues stunningly real (Butler, 1998).
Connections to the larger world beyond the prism of the television screen now offer teachers and students ways to dramatically enrich information. In the short span of a decade, classroom television has been transformed by the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. Now teachers access information about upcoming programs, look back to resources they may have missed, and download support material quickly and easily for a program they videotaped overnight. Nearly all programmers who offer videotaping rights to schools provide some form of electronically published support materials. While technologists plan for the convergence of television and computers, teachers are already making the convergence real by linking the advantages of both.
Looking into the future requires seeing beyond television and traditional programming. With the advent of high-speed Internet connections, which bypass standard dial-up telephone lines with digital sets, the convergence of television programming with Web resources will accelerate in new ways. The devices of the digital world are also reducing the costs and complexities of production technologies. Soon, simple video production tools will put sophisticated technologies on the desktop. Not only will teachers use television resources, but also learners themselves will incorporate these resources into classroom presentations.
TV in the Classroom
The electronic chalkboard is here. Televisions and VCRs, in combination with computers, have transformed classroom practice and shifted the dialogue about how instructional media is best configured in learning.
The endorsement of practicing teachers inspires others to rethink the role of the media and to try new approaches. But students—the very root of education's purpose—are the true agents of change. Says David Debs (personal communication, September 30, 1998), director of technology at Mandarin High School in Jacksonville, Florida, Kids today expect to learn in an environment that is much more oriented to video, and they are making the convergence with the Internet in ways that they respond to. Students achieve more in an environment that affirms their styles of learning. They are reforming education; technology is coming from the students.
