What benefits and limitations are involved in using digital media to facilitate student learning and engagement?

Talking about digital media’s part in student learning, as now a days when education sector is facing a very crucial initiative by conducting classes virtually through various digital platforms to take precautions from covid-19. Since it’s birth education has always flourished more and more through exploration and alteration. Living in this 21st century, where technology is so much surpassed in our lives, why not try to implement these technologies in learning environment through digital media. The influence of digital media bring it’s own pros and cons.

What Digital Media is? It is the most accessible source of information for us these days. We are completely surrounded by digital media in our lives, cell phone, laptops, tablets, television, radio, etc. These are the sources which brings us digital media in forms of, audio, videos, photos, articles, social media, advertisements, etc.   

The point of this podcast was to state benefits and limitations digital media brings In student learning not just in the classrooms but outside schools as well, although digital media can open up variety of fields and interests for students but, it is very important to extract beneficial outcomes from digital media rather than getting limited by it. There are range of ways in which digital media benefits and limits our use of it (further explained in the podcast). The key aim should be spreading awareness about ethical and productive use of digital media.

While making the podcast, or I would say during the research phase I came across multiple uses of digital media and social media in learning methods. One key benefit was that it increases student engagement as students are more interested into subjects when it’s integrated with technology. These benefits were acknowledged my University of Toronto ( link provided in reference list below) as well as one more website which helped me to figure out the limitation which digital media creates. For further references I took some primary source, a book by Simon Lindgren “Digital media and society” in which he explain what digital media is and how it impacts our society, another source was a book by Davis, K, Ambrose, A & Orand, M 2017, ‘Identity and agency in school and afterschool settings: Investigating digital media’s supporting role’, Digital Culture & Education, vol. 9, no. 1, In which it teaches us about the components in which connected learning methods from digital learning works on (includes; personal Interest, Peer culture and Academic Studies). There are few example which were made by me as the assessment required some personal point of view as well.

The difficulties I came across during the post production was to trim the pauses which I took during recording and set the quality of the audio, as I recorded the audio via phone so it had many fluctuation in the pitch of the sound due to unsteady position of mic. There were several things which I learnt from the task, creating a podcast is not an easy task especially when you’re the only one speaking in it, you’ve to keep a good flow and your tone should be variable as per the content you’re delivering, these things helps to draw viewers attention throughout the podcast. The audacity software was unable to run on my laptop due to technical issues so I had to use premier pro cc to edit my podcast due to which I think the sound quality was also compromised. I did not use music in my podcast which I wanted to use but then that would have exceeded the length of my podcast.

Overall, it was initially a great learning opportunity and hopefully I would like to practice this creative process more in future.

References:

 – https://teaching.utoronto.ca/ed-tech/teaching-technology/teaching-social-media/benefits-challenges/

 – https://simplicable.com/new/digital-media

 – Lindgren S, 2017 “Digital Media and Society” , Sage Publications Ltd, 1 Oliver’s Yard, London, UK.

 -Davis, K, Ambrose, A & Orand, M 2017, ‘Identity and agency in school and afterschool settings: Investigating digital media’s supporting role’, Digital Culture & Education, vol. 9, no. 1