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What is Your Digital Learning Motivation?

No matter what your motivation is, Digital Learning Motivation Quiz for Educators has ideas to improve digital & media literacy in your classroom.

Activist

You support students' civic engagement by engaging with media and technology to address real-world issues.

Alt

You challenge students with alternative ways of finding, using, thinking about, and creating media off the beaten path.

Demystifier

You want students to develop critical thinking skills by `pulling back the curtain` on how media is constructed.

Motivator

You cultivate students' autonomy as independent learners who go where their creativity takes them.

Professional

You develop students' creative competencies and practical skills as future authors, artists, writers, or media professionals.

Professor

You want students to gain content knowledge by using media and technology to advance learning goals.

Spirit Guide

You are dedicated to helping students use media to support their social and emotional well-being.

Taste Maker

You want students to appreciate culturally important media in history, art, literature, and sciences.

Teacher 2.0

You help students use media and technology to connect with and learn from others as networked digital citizens.

Techie

You know that digital media technology and tools engage students more deeply in authentic learning.

Trendsetter

You meet students `where they live` by connecting the classroom to contemporary popular culture.

Watchdog

You want students to think about economic and political contexts of media and technology as systems that shape our lives.

What Does the Research Say?

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Description

You have an enduring passion for fostering democratic participation through political action, whether your end goal is social justice, environmentalism, public health, or any number of specific social and political issues. You see your role in the classroom as a catalyst for students to begin to understand how they might have a voice in improving the quality of life in their communities and in the world. You want your students to understand that they have the power, even at a young age, to change the world as engaged participants in the democratic process.

Protect

Teaching students how to guard themselves from harmful and oppressive media messages and how to “talk back” to negative and stereotypical media images.
Preparing students for democratic participation with robust knowledge of the civic process.
Sharing a particular vision for civic engagement based on views or media with which students may be unfamiliar.

Empower

Helping students to feel comfortable voicing their own opinions and ideas in political action.
Providing opportunities for students to create media that expresses their original ideas within an existing political or social landscape.
Encouraging students to question and challenge assumed beliefs and opinions about the world to foster civic engagement.

Strengths

Activists are often natural leaders who raise students’ consciousness about their role in a healthy democratic environment. They often have extensive knowledge of global and local issues around which students can become passionate and engaged directly in a political process, whether they advocate for a new recycling program in their school or write letters to local news stations.

Challenges

Activists sometimes over- or underestimate the extent to which students have truly developed their own sets concrete values and beliefs—in some cases, students’ “home” beliefs are contrary to the vision of the instructor, while in others students simply do not know yet what they believe. This makes the Activist teacher vulnerable to imposing a specific set of beliefs on students who are either opposed to or unsure of their instructor’s opinions or values.

Description

You are an inventive, perhaps “DIY,” teacher. You’re always ready to challenge students with alternative ways of finding, using, thinking about, and making media in the classroom. Whether you use open source programs on school computers, encourage students to start alternative clubs or magazines, or introduce students to media that’s “off the beaten path” of mainstream and mass media, you are likely a key proponent of broadening students’ understanding of the many different ways that people can communicate in the world.

Protect

Teaching students to question the authority of professional, mainstream, and mass media points of view on the world.
Sharing alternative cultural touchstones with students that have been transformative in your own life or in other cultures.
Helping students to better understand alternative histories and points of view that they may not learn in textbooks or other authoritative classroom media.

Empower

Encouraging students to imagine multiple ways of communicating a message or idea.
Giving students an “inside look” at, and the skills to make, work that is less “glossy” and difficult to produce than most professionally-produced media.
Providing students opportunities to make media that engages with formats, modes of construction, and points of view with which they are unfamiliar.

Strengths

Alts are, as their name implies, adept at creating a classroom environment that is curious, creative, and engaging in the way that it breaks from students’ expectations. Alts are often students’ first points of entry to worlds of art, current events, popular culture, and literature that offers more diverse points of view than traditional classroom media.

Challenges

Alts can sometimes, in teaching alternatives to the traditional canon of the classroom canons, create new sacred cows that are not subject to the scrutiny and critical questioning of mainstream or traditional media. Alts sometimes alienate students who identify with popular culture in strong and complex ways; they present alternatives without equally respecting what their students love the most.

Description

Did you know that crime shows on television are filmed almost entirely in front of green screens? That when fast food companies advertise their products, they hire artists and sculptors to make the ingredients look more palatable? That magazine pictures are digitally manipulated? If any of these questions pique your curiosity, you might be a Demystifier. As a teacher, you are intent on “pulling back the curtain” of media production in all of its forms, from writing a book to editing a Hollywood film. When you teach students, you pull them into what at first seems like a secret conspiracy, but eventually becomes part of the foundation of their critical thinking—that is, asking good “how” and “why” questions—and classroom learning.

Protect

Helping students identify how manipulation of images distorts our perceptions of reality.
Defending students from negative messages from mass media and popular culture that have an impact on their self-esteem or self-image.
Questioning students uncritical pleasure in the problematic media they use.

Empower

Using demystification of media production processes to encourage students to make their own work.
Asking students to make connections between the processes of media production and the media they use in their everyday lives.
Encouraging students to ask their own questions about how and why media is constructed.

Strengths

Demystifiers are good at identifying teachable moments when students struggle to understand how and why media is constructed. Their students make meaningful connections to their home uses of media; often leave their classes saying that they will “never watch a movie,” “never read a book,” or “never use a website” the same way again.

Challenges

Demystifiers need to be on the lookout for confusion as they pull back the various curtains that conceal the constructedness of media—it is better for curtains to be opened (so to speak) in the service of a particular, meaningful lesson, and not simply to foster student engagement. Demystifiers also need to combat students’ cynicism as they learn about media’s constructedness; when students make their own work using their knowledge of constructedness, they understand that whether constructedness is “good” or “bad” depends on point of view and also the context in which it was produced.

Description

You are an inspiration, a catalyst for your students’ creative energy. Students who have never felt comfortable speaking up in class, participating in activities, or contributing to class dialogue find it easier to speak their mind when you’re leading the classroom. But you don’t necessarily see yourself as a leader, even if you are one—you see yourself as more of a springboard or facilitator. What’s important is what the students want to say and to do; your role is to help them to be the best “them” they can be.

Protect

Teaching students how to guarding themselves media that may be harmful to their self-esteem or sense of self-worth.
Requiring students to provide positive feedback to their peers that affirms the strongest qualities of student participation and classroom work.
Carefully selecting classroom materials that will not challenge students’ sense of power in their own creative expression.

Empower

Fostering an environment in which students feel comfortable sharing their ideas, opinions, and unique creative talents to express themselves.
Encouraging students to pursue subjects that they find interesting or engaging as the basis for classroom activities and projects.
Providing opportunities for students to spark and sustain their own dialogue in the classroom, with only occasional scaffolding and direction from the teacher.

Strengths

Motivators are the teachers students remember fondly for their commitment to collaboration and student voice—students feel that their own ideas and creative spirit are respected and developed. Motivators are also sensitive to bringing every student along for the creative journey; their charisma make it difficult for students to opt out.

Challenges

Motivators can sometimes err on the side of too little structure or too much chaos in the classroom, which can impede student clarity and direction—though students’ voices are powerful, they are also in a state of development, which means that students may not know yet exactly what they have to say. Motivators also need to ensure that students feel comfortable not only expressing themselves, but questioning each other’s work respectfully and challenging each other to do better and more thoughtful work.

Description

You have high standards for your students’ work, and you may be seen as the go-to media professional in your school. You’re the kind of teacher who knows how to push your students to understand and emulate the professional conventions that you know is important to being taken seriously in the world of media creation. You may also be interested in getting your students into the real world of media creation, thinking about ways to bring other authors, professionals, and media-makers into your classroom to enrich the learning experience.

Protect

Protect students from technical failure in their media productions and projects.
Equip students to recognize how professional production carries specific messages that may be negative or harmful.
Prevent organizational chaos with a hierarchal production model (with explicit roles) that limit students’ tendency to go off-task or be unproductive.

Empower

Instill a sense of professionalism and promote concentrated effort on media production projects.
Help students think of themselves as “real” authors speaking to real audiences in a professional language that users of mass media understand.
Provide an academic or career path for students through media production and media industries by modeling professional skills, behaviors, and standards.

Strengths

Professionalism looks good. Professionals are usually good at holding students to a higher set of aesthetic standards than typical youth media projects. Professionals are often in charge of professional technology and equipment available at school. They also inspire students to look into continuing opportunities to create media in after-school and academic programs.

Challenges

Professionalism in and of itself can suffer from the “style over substance” problem. Students emulate professional models in news, film production, or graphic design, but do not necessarily bring the same rigor to academic or content aspects of the work. When professional values are only aesthetic, they may discourage students from thinking about the processes of research, analysis, and evaluation crucial to high-quality media projects.

Description

You are always careful to balance your enthusiasm for media and technology with a clear connection to your academic standards. You want to be sure that media and technology are not used in the classroom for their own sake, but to advance your lessons, goals, and learning target. Multimedia presentations, engaging websites, and educational technology serve the purpose of helping you deliver the core content that students need to master.

Protect

Keep students on-task with current assignments and less prone to diversions or chaotic, unstructured media activities.
Heavily scaffold and structure classroom conversations to help students master content and better understand lesson goals.
Use educational technologies as “safe spaces” where students can explore within well-defined content boundaries.

Empower

Help students understand how engaging media connects to the content lessons that are crucial to their academic development.
Expand students’ conception of what kinds of composition practices are acceptable in academic environments by encouraging them to make presentations, videos, and other media products.
Provide a vision of educational success that includes mastery of media materials relevant to their academic success, including word processing, multimedia presentation creation, video production, and other skills.

Strengths

Professors have a keen understanding of their goals in teaching, and so do their students. Professors are less likely to experience the kind of messiness that can be inherent in large, collaborative media projects. Their students always have a clear sense of the relevance of integrating technology and media to immediate needs of a lesson and subject.

Challenges

By hewing to curriculum needs, sometimes Professors miss opportunities to go “off-script” to exciting and important teachable moments. Using technology and media in the classroom provides lots of opportunities for creativity, improvisation, and exploration that may or may not be easily integrated into a strict lesson template. These kinds of spontaneous and semi-structured explorations can help deepen students’ understanding of some of the issues that are most important to them in their everyday lives—issues that involve their families, communities, current events, and important but unpredictable life lessons.

Description

Kids these days! They can recite rap lyrics and pop songs, but what about the verses of Shakespeare? They’ve memorized every plot point in the hottest Hollywood blockbuster, but what about seminal American or foreign films? You want to broaden your students’ horizons. You want them to have exposure to the kinds of media experiences that put them in touch with historical, aesthetic, and critical appreciation. You know that a key component of students’ future interactions will require them to draw from a variety of cultural sources both classical and popular. At worst, students’ tendencies to pop culture trivia will be useless to them in the future. At best, they will use their understanding of contemporary culture along with their understanding of other forms of classic literature, art, and media to connect pop culture to its cultural heritage.

Protect

Challenging students’ limited perceptions of culture with widely-recognized cultural touchstones.
Asking students to distinguish between superficial and complex media messages.
Developing inventive strategies to steer student engagement toward the “classics” in art, literature, and other media.

Empower

Helping students to use reasoning and discrimination to distinguish between positive and negative messages.
Making connections between the popular culture that students love and its cultural heritage.
Encouraging students to ask critical questions about the aesthetics and historical context of all media used in the classroom.

Strengths

Taste-makers often bring a wealth of knowledge of the arts to bear on the choices they make in the classroom, helping their students to understand and care more deeply about classic literature, art, and other media. Taste-makers also tend to take a “long view” of culture, making important historical and aesthetic connections between contemporary culture and its forbears.

Challenges

Taste-makers sometimes inflect their own taste in “classic” media in their approach to popular media, which can be disengaging for students who identify themselves by so-called “shallow” media. Taste-makers can also be reluctant to use the same level of critical questioning and skepticism when dealing with the “classics” that they use to deconstruct contemporary culture.

Description

You are an educator who understands that participation in digital media and learning cultures requires flexibility to new formats, modes of expression, and participation in and out of school. You might read Shakespeare plays along with Hollywood adaptations. You might use online or interactive versions of classic literature to explore meaning behind texts. Or you might use online discussion boards and courseware to activate students’ enthusiasm for connecting to one another. Teacher 2.0 teachers are “anything goes”—they are restless and innovative, always trying new things in the classroom and finding new ways to connect learning to children’s culture.

Protect

Help students understand respectful interpersonal relationships on- and off-line through structured activities.
Create a safe classroom space for students to try new forms of analysis and communication without exposing them to some of the harsher realities of public and online life.
Find ways to make traditional subject matter engaging, helping students focus on multiple forms of core content.

Empower

Spark classroom conversations about a variety of media and students’ relationships to it, creating text-to-text and text-to-self connections.
Give students confidence to evaluate, analyze, and create media in multiple forms even if they have challenges with their print literacy skills.
Honor students’ participation in fan culture and engagement in media as a key component of their in-class learning.

Strengths

Teacher 2.0’s are endlessly inventive and find lots of new ways to engage students in a variety of subjects. They explore opportunities for students to interact with one another online and in class through new media and technology, and connect to students emotionally by taking their pleasure in both engaging digital media and classroom learning seriously.

Challenges

Because of the divergent nature of the Teacher 2.0 teaching style, lessons are often vulnerable to hiccups, unforeseen challenges, and remaining unfinished, as when students don’t have time to watch a whole film, don’t adequately engage with one another on online platforms, or don’t complete a media production. Teacher 2.0’s also occasionally miss the ways in which students choose not to participate with one another, or their desire to sometimes leave their enthusiasm for media “at home.”

Description

You’re one of the hippest teachers in school, sharing with your students and a few teachers your own pop culture knowledge and your drive to learn more about kid culture. You might be a parent who has as many pop songs on your iPod as your children do, if not more. Or maybe your own most-loved popular culture isn’t too far removed from that of your students. You are inquisitive about the trends and hot topics that make up a crucial component of the fabric of your students’ everyday lives. You want school culture to meet kids where they live with the popular culture they know and love—and that you occasionally love just as much yourself, whether it’s pop and hip-hop music, blockbuster films, reality TV, or any number of other shared cultural reference points.

Protect

Nurturing a safe environment for appropriate popular culture in the classroom.
Using a variety of popular culture texts to have students ask questions about its authors, target audiences, messages, meanings, and representations of reality.
Asking students to reflect on their use of popular culture, particularly when its effects may be harmful to their well-being or self-image.

Empower

Opening inquiry about popular culture as an important component of classroom discussion.
Engaging in students" interests of new technologies like smart phones and mobile devices.
Encouraging students to make connections between popular culture and more traditional curriculum material.

Strengths

Trendsetters acknowledge the wide variety of popular culture texts that students often feel passionately about as a way to engage them in formal learning. They also make strong connections between students’ areas of expertise and specialized knowledge (popular culture) and new knowledge (curriculum content).

Challenges

Trendsetters can have difficulty addressing students who feel culturally “disconnected” or actively define themselves against the popular culture that the majority of their peers love. Trendsetters also need to carefully ensure that conversations about popular culture don’t begin and end merely with “love it or hate it,” but instead explore how and why popular culture does what it does.

Description

You are suspicious and concerned about the way that economic systems and institutions influence our everyday lives, particularly through the media we use. You want your students and your peers to be more mindful of the ways that things are bought and sold. Who owns and controls the media content that we see, hear, read, and play with? How do advertising, public policy, and media ownership affect our relationship to consumerism? Why is it often so difficult for students to ask critical questions of powerful children’s media industry leaders like Disney or Nickelodeon? You sometimes feel solely responsible for giving your students a “wake-up call” about the economic and institutional inner-workings of the media, and the world, that surrounds them.

Protect

Debunking myths and “tricks” in advertisements, popular culture, and mass media.
Fostering students’ skepticism about the motivations of media institutions.
Helping students guard against pervasive messages that glorify consumerism.

Empower

Helping students to ask critical questions about the systems through which media is created, distributed, and used.
Developing students’ concrete understanding about media’s relationship to economics and politics.
Encouraging students to create their own work that challenges the dominance of consumerist messages, such as public service announcements or parodies of mass media and popular culture.

Strengths

Watchdog teachers are often the first, and sometimes only, catalysts for students’ major “aha moments” as they start to make connections between institutions and systems of power and the media they use. Watchdogs capitalize on children’s sense of power in debunking “trickery” or identifying manipulation in order to help students understand complicated political systems and other issues in democracy and civics.

Challenges

Watchdogs’ focus on systems of power can sometimes lead students to adopt a cynical view of media ownership—and fostering students’ cynicism at a young age can be “fuel for the fire” for students who are already skeptical of the systems of power (in their schools and communities) in their everyday lives. The Watchdog approach to media ownership can also lead to parroting of teacher values, as savvy students who regularly take pleasure in mass media and popular culture figure out the “correct” answers in lessons without taking them to heart.