Raised on a steady diet of MTV, feature films and broadcast television, today's students are much more visually sophisticated than previous generations, but their attention spans have been decreased by the fast-paced editing of commercial productions. This presents some difficult challenges for teachers. Education requires concentration and students must learn to focus their attention on specific information and topics. Since people are reading less, they are much more likely to become distracted or even bored by academic subjects. Unfortunately, teachers are being forced to compete with the mass media for their student's attention.
Teachers are often critical of television.
After all, this is a medium which is filled with countless hours of situation comedies, game shows, home shopping channels and commercial advertisements. Parents lament that their children spend too much time glued to the screen watching programs filled with gratuitous sex and violence. But the problems of television lie with the content, not the medium, itself. If we step back from the TV and look at it as communications tool, we can see how it actually has the potential for improving the learning process. In fact, video was the first real form of multimedia because it could combine speech, music, text, still and moving pictures.