It is no surprise that curriculum designers today are finding a lot of success in increasing student engagement by incorporating digital media into their lessons. With podcasts, videos, online forums, and social media becoming widely available, a broader reach is achieved--catering to many different learning needs. Gone are the days of relying solely on textbook material. But that’s really just from the perspective of how digital media is consumed in the educational setting.

A more fascinating benefit of using digital media in education is the opportunity for learners to find and share their voice about what they are learning. By sharing videos or podcasts about what they’ve learned, they are also presented with the opportunity to not only learn about effective communication but also to build self-efficacy which is key to internalized learning. Self-efficacy “refers to a person’s belief in one’s capabilities to learn or perform behaviors. Research shows that self-efficacy influences academic motivation, learning, and achievement.”¹ With digital media, the assessment of how good the material is no longer needs to rely mainly on a teacher. The immediate feedback by means of likes, comments, number of subscribers on produced digital media gives the producer (the learner) some understanding of how well they did.

Neha, a 12 years-old at the time of her first video, is a wonderful example of a learner having not only consumed digital media to learn how to code but also produced knowledge about how best to support learners in doing the same. She demonstrates this with how she layers her coding tutorial with tips. In part 2 of her video series “Coding for Kids in Python”, she presents keyboard shortcuts that she found useful in learning to code.

Screenshot of Coding for Kids Part 2 Shortcut Helper

Here she demonstrates that clearly she knows how to code in Python, but also in order to code efficiently, she has recognized that knowledge of other environmental things like shortcuts are also important to know. Her self-efficacy is also in full display in part 12, where she explains the concept of for-loops through small imaginary dialogue between the programmer and the machine. Her explanations are quintessential to who she is as a modern empowered learner and teacher--something her more-than-seven-thousand followers and I likely agree on.

Resources
1. "Why Self-Esteem Hurts Learning But Self-Confidence Does The Opposite". InformEd. 2014-07-05. Retrieved 2020-10-10.

2. NPStation. “Coding for Kids Part 2.” YouTube, 18 Aug 2019,
https://youtu.be/-zPUKUuVOPk

3. NPStation. “Coding for Kids Part 12.” YouTube, 28 Jun 2020,
https://youtu.be/ICboMQZDgcw