While reading this article I was intrigued by the study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006 which researched why almost a third of American public-high-school students fail to graduate with their class. Most students told researches that school was boring. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised at the final recommendations which were to “make school more relevant and engaging (4).”
Schools have not changed in a long time, even though the students who attend those schools have. Obviously, this is a problem we face as educators. The solution seems simple, make schools more relevant and engaging, but why haven’t they?
Perhaps it is because we look at the way children use media so critically as Levine suggests, and instead of criticizing we should use their interests in media and technology to our advantage.
“Kids are literally wearing digital media,” Levine says. “It’s present everywhere in their lives, except for in the learning environment(4).”
I whole heartedly agree with Levine’s statements; we need to incorporate these new technologies into out classrooms to make learning more relevant to our students.
Incorportating video games into the classroom is definitely a step in the right direction in that students are so interested in gaming. Even though it is relatively new to schools I am interested in seeing developments in this idea of gaming in school and how I can use it one day.
When speaking about the idea of gaming in the classroom Levine says: “Odds are it will take a long time. But I don’t know what the alternative is. My view of it is that we will never get to the holy land in terms of educational performance unless we do something about the engagement factor(4).”
This leads me back to my thoughts on test preparation- we need to go outside of traditional methods and incorporate students apparent interest in technology or nothing will change. We can’t just keep trying the same things and expect different results from our students.
Links
I found this website to be quite relevant to the article Video Games in the Clasroom. It even has activity ideas and all sorts of nifty ideas.
I am right there with you on the concept of schools needing to evolve to match their students. As new teachers, we will want to implement digital technology and other multi-modal functions into our classrooms, but I've been hearing that many aren't even given that chance.
ReplyDeleteMany schools are limited by what technology they can afford to purchase and a lot of teachers are not tech-savvy enough to make it work with what they have, so they stick with traditional methods of instruction. Our students are engaged in these digital media that affect every aspect of their lives--shouldn't education be included?