Wednesday, November 11, 2009

From Consumers to Critics and Creators | Edutopia


From Consumers to Critics and Creators Edutopia:

"For many students, what happens in the traditional American classroom is boring. Small wonder, when you compare such relatively inanimate stuff as pencil-and-paper-bound reading, writing, and math drills to the media mix of mind-bending imagery and hair-raising sound that consumes most of their waking hours outside school.

A recent study, 'Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,' found that students in grades 3-12 spend an average of six hours and twenty-one minutes plugged in to some type of media each day. Accounting for multitasking, the figure jumps to about eight and a half hours including nearly four hours of TV viewing and forty-nine minutes of video game play. Comparatively, homework gets slightly less than fifty minutes of attention."