EDLD Week 5 Reflection

This week the videos that I watched were mainly about teaching the students today through gaming.  In the video, Big Thinkers: Sasha Barab on New-Media Engagement ,Sasha Barab discussed the fact that the schools of today are giving teachers old tools in order to teach the students.  He goes on to explain that students need to be given an opportunity to integrate the information that they are learning by actually solving problems.  Giving students the opportunity to use the information that they have learned is going to give them a connection, a sense of power, and a reason to learn the information put in front of them.  From a very young age children are sitting in front of a variety of gaming devices which allows them the control of the outcome.

One of the subjects that I teach is science.  I can only imagine the learning that would be taking part in my classroom if I had access to a program where my students watched, learned, and then took part in fixing, building, or living in the units that I teach.  I can teach about forces, life cycles, rock cycles, and the water cycle but if they were able to be a part of each one of these in a game type scenario they would be able to transform that information, see it in action, and convert the written text into an experience.  Experiences are going to make more of an impact on the student and the knowledge he takes away from the unit. 

Allowing our students to access this technology frequently brings us other important aspects that we need to be teaching our students.  Researcher Howard Gardner in the video called Big Thinkers: Howard Gardner on Digital Youth, discusses that we should be teaching our children digital ethics.  He conversed about what exactly it meant to be ethical on the internet.  They were a sense of identity, sense of honestly, sense of privacy, sense of ownership, and a sense of authorship.  There are many problems that arise from being in a technological world and he understands that you can learn a lot, find out whatever and with almost whomever,  but it is very important to know that these new forms of learning should not dictate to us they should just be opening up new avenues to our learning world.

Teachers are going to have their hands full.  They need to learn new ways to teach our students through technology but also learn, delegate, and model ethical behavior on the internet.  It has never been an easy job to teach the students that are coming into our classrooms but I am worried that we are not being given the tools that we need to ensure their success.  There is so much new information and new teaching strategies it will be vital that schools give their teachers updated tools, and direction in which to use these tools. 

 

Edutopia.org. (nd). Big Thinkers: Sasha Barab on New-Media Engagement. Retrieved from

     http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-sasha-barab-video

 

Edutopia.org (nd). Big Thinkers: Howard Gardner on Digital Youth. Retrieved from

     http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-howard-gardner-video