Media Ecology is the study of media as environments. During this day and time media plays a huge role in our everyday lives. The media ecology of my high school differs a little from the media ecology here at UGA. A few of my teachers in high school didn’t care if we used our phones in class but others took it very seriously. My high school didn’t really have a need for us to use laptops in the classroom unless there was a paper or project or something that we would use our laptops for. But other than that we just took handwritten notes at my high school.
The “tech” guy at my high school was crazy. Our administration were completely against cell phone use in the classroom and they were serious about it. Towards the end of my senior year they blocked Facebook, if you were using the school Wi-Fi, which you had to because otherwise you couldn’t access anything because there was no service in the building. One day, I was sitting in class and I heard this noise coming from the hallway that sounded like a metal detector. I figured out that our “tech” guy was walking up and down the hallway using his cell phone to see if there were cell phones being used in the classroom. And if cell phones were being used the sound went off. My high school took cell phone use very seriously.
Teaching strategies at my high school and here at UGA are similar. In high school, most of my teachers taught using a PowerPoint. Here at UGA, all of my professors teach using a PowerPoint and some make it accessible through eLC for studying purposes before and after class. Which I believe I learn better that way anyway. All of my professors at UGA allow students to use their laptops in class. At my high school it wasn’t allowed in most classes. Forms of communication differed a little in high school than they do in college but there was a similar thing used. In high school, I had several teachers who used the Remind1o1 app to send out like assignment, and test reminders. That app was only a one-way communication system though, as a student I couldn’t respond. At my high school, we did have a thing we used called Renweb, where we could access assignment due dates, tests, and our grades. This is similar to eLC. At UGA, professors use eLC to communicate with us on assignments, email and tests. The media ecology in some way differ for me from high school to college on the subject of laptop usage and phone usage in the classroom but other than that they are similar.
It’s really interesting to look at the difference between cell phone usage in high schools. I went to a private school freshman year where our phones were completely forbidden in class. But, the rest of high school, when I went to a huge public school, my teachers were pretty relaxed about phones. (As long as they weren’t being too huge of a distraction.)
Your high school’s tech guys scares me, Chandler!
You’d think that having all kinds of access to great media would make things somehow more universal—so that which school you went to would be less relevant. But these blog postings suggest to me that the “media ecologies” of schools are more and more divergent (as Logan’s comment confirms)