May 2005 — Industry Perspective
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Teaching Digital Communication to All Students
Reaching All Students
Students start communicating digitally at an early age and will continue to do so for the rest of their lives. How technically advanced students become will depend on the level of skill they need for their work or personal lives. In school, it’s important for all students to communicate what they know; digital communication levels the playing field. While some students may struggle with writing, others will find their stronger voice in images, video and audio. Special-education students may also find it easier to express themselves verbally or through images rather than in writing.
Multimedia not only motivates students, it also taps into their different strengths and allows them to tell a richer story. Demonstrating the understanding of a science process, for example, can be difficult to do with words alone. But when a student shows the process using animated images with narration, then the explanation is more complete. And as students build their knowledge of science, they learn digital communication skills.
We don’t know what types of communication tools will be available when primary school students graduate from college. However, we do know that students need substantive opportunities to learn how to approach a communication problem, select appropriate media and express themselves effectively across different scenarios. If we give them real exposure to loads of communication media, students can become adept users of the next generation of tools.
Effective Communication
The ISTE National Educational Technology Standards Project notes that technical expertise is just one component in a range of skills that will help prepare students to live, learn and work in an information-rich society. The organization emphasizes that effective technology integration in schools can enable students of all ages to learn collaborative, problem solving and creativity skills.
Students are not just studying how to use tools such as Dreamweaver when they learn to communicate effectively in Web media. They’re also learning how to approach a project, as well as how to understand their audience, message and purpose. In addition, students are learning how to think critically as they decide on an effective way to present their message.
College students should especially develop a wide range of digital and cognitive skills to prepare themselves for jobs. For instance, journalism majors should learn to write and build Web content since all TV and newspapers have a Web presence. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses represent half of the U.S. economy output and employ half of the private sector workforce. These small businesses have also generated 60-80% of the net new jobs annually in the last decade. In a small company, no matter what kind of business, it’s now necessary to be capable of communicating digitally with clients and customers. At the very least, companies need a Web site and somebody to build and maintain it. People share responsibilities when an organization is very small, so more and more prospective employers will be looking for strong digital communicators who can collaborate as team players.
Today’s students have the technology. They experience the world through multimedia and want to communicate in the same way. Therefore, we can prepare students to communicate more effectively by teaching them the whole communication process from planning the message all the way to testing for usability.
