Media Arts Festival

My school held a Media Arts Festival last night to celebrate the work our students do in the field of media arts. I was asked to MC the event in my capacity as an educational technologist. Here's the speech in all of its glory:

Good evening and welcome to the first ever Voorheesville Media Arts Festival. My name is Brian Stumbaugh, and one of my many tasks here at the high school is to function as the educational technologist. This job affords me the opportunity to be in classrooms and to see the exceptionally fine work that our students are doing in the field of technology. So it is my great pleasure to be here tonight and to serve as Master of Ceremonies as we showcase our students' work in the field of media arts.

But first it is essential to grasp the idea of media arts. And to grasp the idea of media arts we must begin with the basic premise that the world is changing. These students face a much different workplace than that of their parents. It is a much faster, more competitive place, one that is filled with smart phones, text messages, and status updates. And with that changing world comes a changing school. The old, traditional methodologies are fading, and so are the tried and true projects. Students are losing engagement, lured by the draw of the faster paced, sexier digital world. In short, we are losing them.

So how do we bring them back? The answer is Media Arts. Media Arts represents a marriage of conventional art, research, and writing with the new and exciting world of technology, whether it be movie making, digital music creation, or digital storytelling, by blending these diverse and oftentimes cutting edge media with more time-honored educational approaches, we have the opportunity to connect with students on their own turf: the digital playground. The researcher and educational writer Marc Prensky describes today's kids as digital natives because they grew up with digital media (in fact, all of the students whose work we highlight tonight grew up in a world that always had the Internet!). We, the older generation, are simply digital immigrants, slowly dipping our toes in the technological world whipping by us at light speed. But smart immigrants don't let go of their past, so, being smart, we have to focus on the traditional skills of planning, research, and writing while we're all having fun hanging out on that digital playground.

And what do you hear on that playground? Names like Digital Storytelling, Stop Motion Animation, and Documentary Film Making have budged their way into the forefront of our educational lexicon, taking up places next to the traditional essay, research project, and term paper. Sometimes they even surpass those older forms in the scope and breadth of student engagement. Students are spending time on the computer with applications like Facebook, Twitter, Photoshop, and iMovie, and, as you will see tonight, they are doing more than just typing. They’re researching, creating, mixing, and filtering data; they’re collecting artifacts, writing copy, and storyboarding ideas. In short, they're building skills that they need to be competitive in this ever-changing global economy. Never before has the need for these skills been greater, and, as you will see tonight, our students are rising to the challenge.