Educating the Players: are Video Games What We Need to Boost Learning?

The article below describes reasons as to why technology can be used as a tool for learning....not education....LEARNING!!! It states that people are often taught, and at the end of it they might know things without actually understanding them. We are taught to remember and know things, but we might not fully understand why that is the case. So an experiment in learning with using technology was done. Boxes of tablets were delivered to an Ethiopian village. No instructions were given, just boxes lying around. The children, within minutes, had figured out how to open the boxes, turn on the tablets, and start playing around with them. Within months, these children had learned their ABCs. So with that knowledge, can these children with the gift of technology teach themselves how to read and write? 

"If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn."

The article goes on to elaborate that we need to engage children in learning rather than talk at them. They will not learn this way. So now research is being done alongside professional video game companies such as EA to hopefully better understand the influence of "play" in learning.

I personally loved this article. This is mainly because I have always had the mentality of play being the most important aspect of a person's social learning process. Not only do we have fun while we play, but we learn behavioral skills, become aware of and adapt to our surroundings, learn about how to interact with various objects and organisms, and really connect with the world around us. What better lessons can you get from just reading a book or being lectured at? We need to make learning more engaging and interactive for students. Technology can be a tool for this, but mainly the teachers are who need to take the tools at their fingertips and implement them in their classrooms in a way that will inspire the students to actually want to learn. I was very impressed to hear that pro video game companies are starting to see the value (even if it is monetary) in doing research to produce games that offer educational inspiration to our kids.

What type of game do you think might be educational? Is any game that a kid picks up educational in some way?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/educating-players-are-games-the-future-of-education/

Does Technology Help or Hinder our Education?

The article referenced below talks about issues regarding technology in education. It specifically tries to address how technology can improve student learning, or to also show that it does not. The article basically recommends the "flipped classroom" setting, in which students learn the content of a lesson at home and then come back to learn more about it in the classroom. Students learn more effectively by becoming actively engaged, and following a flipped classroom setting allows more in-class time for activity and engagement. The article also goes on stating that technology should be used as a tool to get away from strict math and language skills and focus on creative skills as well. Yet there are issues with implementing technology worldwide. There are countries where internet is not everywhere, and it would be difficult to implement the same quality of lessons produced by technologies than it would in countries such as the U.S, where we can find internet on just about every corner of our streets. The primary goals one way or another should be the improvement of primary and secondary education.

This article was short but sweet. It talks about how flipped classrooms and technology are the best way to go when it comes to running a virtual classroom nowadays. But if it can not be done right, then in my opinion it should not be done at all! If you do not have up-to-date technology, or slow internet, or students with no access to materials at home, then the technological classroom should not be implemented. Our main focus should be the students, not the methods. As teachers, we are professionals and we should be expected to adapt to teaching situations as much as we would expect a customer service representative to know how to deal with and handle all sorts of various situations. Teachers need to remember that, while technology can be an extremely effective tool, it is NOT always the best option!

What do you think? How will you implement technology in your classroom? What would you do if your students were not able to access the technology at home?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/10/how-can-technology-improve-school-education/

Personal Learning Networks (PLN), Useful or Time Consuming?

So after creating my first Personal Learning Network (PLN), I have to say that there are both advantages and disadvantages to creating a PLN. My PLN consisted of subscribing to various RSS feeds using Feedly, subscribing to Twitter and following various posters, using Classroom 2.0 Ning, and various other forms of social media. After using these different applications and sites over the last few weeks, I can definitely say that I have very clear observations about both as to which I think are useful tool for the modern educator as well as which ones I think should be left in the dust.

So the first tool that I played around with was RSS Feeds. I have been a user of RSS feeds for almost a decade now, but I was always using them in a less than normal methods (I had always used RSS style website builders, like Wordpress, to make my own customizable personal websites over the years). RSS feeds are particularly useful for news or blog sites that have a constant level of information being put on them. But putting them on an RSS feed style website means that a person can easily subscribe to those feeds and get the most up-to-date news from those feeds. They can also take these feed subscriptions and put them all into one place, which is what I did using a website called Feedly. Feedly allows you to put all of your RSS feed subscriptions in one easy place for you to refer to for all of your news information. This was a tool that I actually liked. It put a lot of the RSS feeds that I was particularly interested in into one place. I subscribed to various educational feeds as well as TED Talks feeds (which I was particularly interested in seeing more of on a weekly basis). So now instead of checking multiple news websites, I was able to get relevant information and news that I am particularly interested all in one easily acceptable place. By using this you avoid looking at a bunch of fluff articles that you are uninterested on mainstream news sites. So Feedly is definitely a site that I will be using in the future to contain all of my relevant information.

While I like Feedly and the RSS subscriptions to cater to my news needs, I also realized that while the topics are interesting that I just did not have the time in my week to read every one that I wanted to. But this is one thing that I liked about creating a Twitter account. I had a Twitter account many years ago as a personal account, but I never really liked it because I never really saw the point in only being able to post a short amount of words or phrases in a "tweet". To some extent, I still do not get the hype. However having the same RSS subscriptions that I had on my Feedly put onto my Twitter account was great. I would get a short, abbreviated post about various topics via my Twitter that I could easily check on multiple times a day without it taking too much time. I followed @TEDTalks, @SanDiegoCounty, @UTNorth, and of course @TheEllenShow since Ellen Degeneres is always amazing and hilarious! While I liked to see the posts from the various followings and such, I did not get into following specific #hashtags in particular. I tweeted several times and made my own hashtags, but I did not find myself following any particular ones. I put out several tweets and responses to several other posts. However the only real reaction I got to most of them was people "liking" them with the heart symbol. I never really got to experience much conversation. While I know Twitter can be used as a conversation and marketing tool, I still found the most use of it from an educational standpoint in order to subscribe to various bits of information.

The website tool that I definitely disliked the most was Classroom 2.0 Ning. I found this website to be outdated and completely confusing. You go to the homepage, and it is not clear exactly what the purpose of the site is supposed to be. It says that it is a social network on the homepage, but since there are links to videos, product ads, upcoming events, forum links, award banners, etc. (seriously...the list could go on!). I went on multiple times to try to get involved and experienced in this tool, and I ultimately believe that it is just messy and outdated. It is used by too many learning settings and even various languages, so it is just muddy looking and difficult to use. I can easily say that I learned nothing from this site because it was so difficult to effectively understand it or to become fully engaged in it. I read several group posts from a Teacher Education group, and the information was interesting but outdated as it was posted back in 2010. Because of the information being so stale, I could not take the information seriously and with credibility. Therefore I believe that this tool is too outdated, messy and unused to consider ever utilizing it in a modern PLN.

Overall I liked creating and using my PLN. I believe that I will continue to add to and learn from my PLN as both a college student and as an educator. I would definitely recommend being cautious using Twitter for social uses other than subscribing to other posts. As a professional, we need to make sure that we have a minimal and completely professional appearance when it comes to our profiles on social media. I should not create a professional Twitter account and then post inappropriate presidential debate posts using that account or showing anything that could get me in trouble with my position as an educator. This goes for all social media, such as Facebook. we as educators need to be professional and responsible for anything that we do online to not only protect ourselves, but our students and faculties as well. Overall I believe having a PLN can definitely be a very useful tool for any professional trying to stay more connected to social news and media.