Podcasts

“Using Games as Educational Tools”
I think that video games can most certainly be and should be used as educational tools. I say “should be” because it is important that information in classrooms be presented as relevant to the students. A good point was made that children are surrounded by video games. I thought the statistic about Halo was particularly interesting because although going to the movies and playing video games are activities for all age groups, many children make up the bulk of the participants, so the fact that Halo took away from the movie crowd speaks volumes about what children are doing in their spare time more so than earlier generations. Technology is ever-changing and always embraced by the youth of each generation, so it only makes sense for education to keep up with the latest technology. This might mean that traditional classroom games take a back seat to video games. A point in the podcast about competition in the classroom resonates well with me. I do believe that it fuels the desire to work harder. When learning is made into a game, some children might want to participate more so than they would have in its conventional forms, and when they see that there are others participating, they are going to want to stand out. I do think that games should be an extra, not a staple, to the curriculum. Children do need to learn the good old-fashioned reading and writing method so that when they enter the “real world” where their 9-5 does not revolve around video games, they know how to not only cope, but to thrive.


“‘Burp Back Education’ How Can it be Eliminated?”
I do think that in most cases, burp-back education should be eliminated. However, it is not always a negative thing. The group mentioned a scenario in which a teacher gave a spelling lesson that was burp-back. In my years as an elementary school student, we had spelling every year, with a new lesson every week. At most, there were 30 new challenging words every week. Burp-back education to me means anything that is simply memorized and regurgitated. My teachers made me write the words endlessly over the course of the week, and now that seems to be very burp-back-esque, but I did know how to spell them around test time. Although I am very fond of spelling and other such grammar mechanics, there is more technology increasing in availability to fix those errors, so are those teachers really at fault for placing more emphasis on subjects in which burp-back education would not suffice (as it did for spelling)? No. They could have went the extra mile, not taken the easy route, been more creative and actually helped us to apply concepts so that when we saw an unfamiliar word we would be able to spell it based on language of origin, etc. (without millions of spelling lists). The group was spot-on with saying that attention is the key to help eliminate burp-back education. The spelling words written five times each did not keep my attention. Had there been a game (which there sometimes was) or an interactive seminar on the origin of root words, I might have bothered exerting some focus. Maybe there shouldn’t have been so many spelling tests. Heck, it would’ve saved a few trees. Maybe my cognitive ability to construct new words and deconstruct unfamiliar words should have been tested versus fact memorization. This is the underlying problem of burp-back . . . TESTS! Conventional tests (pick A, B, C, or none of the above; choose True or False) simply measure how well you memorize and recollect information that you have buried. Projects seem to be a better assessment of how well you can APPLY concepts.