Multi tasking and cognition

It is important for teachers to understand that the mediated world we reside in causes our students to have short attention spans. This diminished attention span does not mean that we have to entertain our students in order to keep their attention. It calls for teachers to stand up and learn how to engage their students. Students have been taught to “scan the informational environment rather than fix attention on a single element” (35). This means that their short attention span allows for students to focus their attention on a variety of things at one time. For us as teachers we must to teach our students when and how they need to pay close attention.

Teachers can accomplish the goal of focus their students in many ways. In order to achieve this teachers must first and foremost must reach their students level of understanding. In other words teachers need to understand that lecturing for an hour does not engage most students. Teachers need to use what their students know and understand to help students be a part of the learning process. In my future class I will rely heavily on the media to engage and focus my students because I know that the media matters to them. For example, I could give my students a picture of a balcony and ask them to create a short dialogue between two characters based off of this picture. Not only are they looking at the picture and trying to gauge some sort of meaning from it, but they are also writing down spoken language. Due to the fact that the work that is being performed is the students they can take ownership of it. It can engage them in what we are learning because they are a part of it. Not only that but it also allows for them to use their multi tasking skills to create a work of art.

I like the idea that Jenkins presents in the Distributed Cognition section of this paper, “intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed” (37). That is exactly what I have been taught from day one of my experience in training to become a theatre teacher. You cannot teach anyone anything all you can do is help those who desire to learn. I cannot force my students to retain the information I give them for time and all eternity—I cannot force them to be intelligent. What I can do is give my students goals to meet, and after succeeding in reaching said goal show them all that they have accomplished. People are not born smart, rather they are made into smart individuals, which is what I desire to assist my students in becoming.

Jenkins suggests that we teach students to “acquire patterns of thought that regularly cycle through available sources of information as they make sense of developments in the world around them” (). To aid students in actually doing this teachers must help them to use technology. Technology provides a new perspective in order to help students understand the concepts that teachers are trying to file into their brain. For example, If students are being taught about the Pythagorean theorem technology such as excel spreadsheets or even YouTube videos that others have created can help students make sense of it. Teaching is not about cramming as much into a student’s brain as possible in order to pass a test but rather to fill students brains with knowledge that they need and desire. This is not going to be easy to accomplish, but I feel that I can help students to use technology to increase their understanding.