Mark Prensky's article, "Engage Me or Enrage Me" is a great introduction to the basic ideas involved in our tech class. He presents the task that educator must be aware of when dealing with the 21st century student. Their involvement and interest is going to be influenced by the technology they use for entertainment and communication on a day-to-day basis. To understand the types of students that teachers will encounter in the classroom, Prensky describes the three typical kinds of student. The first is the teacher's dream student and the smallest percentile. They are the students who are truly intrinsically self-motivated and genuinely engaged in their personal educational process. The next type is the student who merely goes through the motions. This is the typical student that teachers will encounter. They know what they have to do to get by and how many points they need to pull that 'B'. They aren't interested in their education as a means to an end, but they understand that failing to at least participate and earn average grades could be detrimental to their long-term success. The last type of student Prensky discusses is the student that tunes out the teacher and merely fills a seat in the back of the classroom waiting for the bell to ring. They see school as trivial and not connected to life. Schools typically do reasonably well with the first two groups of students. It is the last group that Prensky feels desire a greater engagement from teachers to make the curriculum relevant.
The question of why? the students feel this way is reasonable and not to difficult to surmise. Students are engaged in things outside of school that they are good at and have creative components to them. They have access to hundreds of t.v. channels, internet, video games, smart phones, and social networks. They have constant interaction with technology and can manipulate and control how they view this information and where it comes from. By comparison, the classroom can be dreadfully dull, slow, and uniform. They don't feel that the same engagement in school that they consistently have outside of it. Teachers are continuing to use an outdated approach to education that frustrates students who are used to fast access to information and a wide variety of choice. When students disengage from activities and tune out their instructors, they are not merely rebelling and asking to be left alone. Rather, they are asking to be challenged in a way that is meaningful to them. Pensky says this best when he proposes the following:
"Maybe if, when learning the 'old' stuff, our students could be continuously challenged at the edge of their capabilities, and make important decisions every half-second, and could have multiple streams of data coming in, and could be given goals that they want to reach but wonder if they actually can, and could beat a really tough game and pass the course-maybe then they wouldn't have to, as one kid puts it, 'power down' every time they go to class."
Penksy closes by suggesting that what is lacking in the classroom isn't necessarily relevance. Instead, educators are missing the mark on engagement. They fail to recognize the temporal situation that students are living in and how it can contribute to the classroom. This is the underlying theme behind game-based learning. This is the fundamental argument for how and why educators need to re-imagine their classroom and to move it forward into the 21st century in order to catch up with their students.
Excellent!
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