knytestorme

In october 2009 it was reported that the Queenslad department of education had banned teachers from friending students on facebook or myspace and that any personal web presence they have had to be made private and appropriate, but with only loose definitions of what was considered inappropriate, or risk loss of pay, demotion or sacking.

It seems that the catalyst for this ban was that there had been eight cases in the last financial year of teachers using these techonologies for inappropriate contact with students and one being removed from their contract purely for the use of innuendo rather than physical contact. As an aside to this it was mentioned that more than 30 teachers in the past 3 years had been removed as teachers for inappropriate conduct with students, therefore all teachers are now banned from being more accessible to their students based on the actions of 8 teachers even though more than twice as many had been removed for the same conduct outside of these technologies.

Scarily, it is reported that “Queensland Association of State School Principals, Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations and Queensland Council for Civil Liberties all support the ban on social website contact, arguing contact can be fraught with danger.” which seems to indicate that all of these organisations view teachers that want to maintain a web presence where students can have contact with the teacher quickly as perverts of some kind and would have to raise questions about why someone would want to work in that system.

In their 2003 article Kirriemuir and McFarlane examined the use of “pure” computer and videogames, as opposed to “edutainment” titles, in the classroom through an informal survey on how and why these types of games are used in an integrated manner with classroom learning.

A survey in 2002 that one of the authors was involved with found:

• Vast majority of classroom software was “edutainment”
• Simple simluation games such as Sim City and RollerCoaster Tycoon were the most common game software found
• Majority of games were PC based
• Significant reluctance from teachers to use consoles in the classroom due to lack of non-games software

The authors further found, in a follow up to the survey and other surveys, that they gave mainly positive results but the schools discontinued using the games after the survey period and appeared to regard the use of them during the survey period as experimental rather than piloting. The authors also reported that when games were used within lessons the impact of them was positive, allowing the teachers to broach many types of subjects either within the confines of the game or even using the games in unintended manners, as well as the games helping to bring some students out of their shells and into a realm they felt more comfortable in.

The article goes on to explain some of the obstacles that were found in both the 2002 and 2003 surveys, but giving no clear solutions on how to avoid these obstacles, and then a list of trends that were found across the surveys as well before offering the final conclusion that there is a general ambivalence still to using computer games as educational tools and that many schools are providing games for recreation or rewards but not using them for educational purposes even where they recognise the potential.

Mitchel Resnick makes a very interesting point at the start of his article, he doesn’t like edutainment. While an interesting, and self-confessed contrarian, point of view he goes on to make some very valid points about how edutainment is often viewed or marketed and why he prefers to use the term “playful learning” rather than edutainment.

The main complaint that Resnick has regarding “edutainment” is that it gives the impression that learning is a whole unpleasant experience that needs to be sugar-coated to become palatable, that education is such that a student needs to be rewarded in some fashion for being able to suffer through it. He also takes the term itself to task in that the companies try to provide students with education and entertainment in a fashion where the student is a passive recipient rather than engaging them as active participants.

He then goes on to give a case study about a young student that participated in, what Resnick calls, “playful learning” where students play and learn at the same time rather than recieving entertainment and education passively. This student was involved in an after-school center that taught children through allowing them to play and experiment with toys such as marbles, building blocks and small programable sensors. The structure of the program was very simple, for students to build “marble machines”, but these machines were then used in a way that students would come up with thoughts and be encouraged to think critically, plan, experiment, etc to build more and more sophisticated structures.

In the end he explains how schools in Singapore are seeing some benefit to these sorts of activities as well but only outside of school hours, during school hours they are stuck with teaching in the core methods even though new methods of teaching using interactivity are showing success.

When looking at how effective edutainment software can be in delivering positive pedagological outcomes we must first look at why we would consider using edutainment, what forms there are, why it can provide learning outcomes and what potential pitfalls are that we must watch out for as teachers. Mary Nell McNeese looks at all of these issues in her article from 2007 and hopefully this journal entry will help distill her data down into an easily digestible format.

According to McNeese, the main purpose of edutainment software is to promote learning to students in a way that they get lost in the fun and don’t realise they are learning. I think this is a good basic explanation but it doesn’t really explain what edutainment software actually is or how it can get students lost in fun so for this we need to explore further along these lines to make sure we, as teachers, know what to look for and how to integrate these ICT’s into our lessons.

Digital games have been found to promote the following skills in students:

• strategising
• problem solving
• reflexes
• co-ordination
• tactical reasoning
• logical thinking
• analytical skills

and so we can see that using these as edutainment tools can bring out a lot of tools that the student may not realise they have and teach them to use them instinctively in appropriate situations.

There are various positive and negatives to edutainment software that need to be recognised and accounted for by teachers using them in the class, such as:

• They can be culturally biased
• They are driven by those looking to make a profit rather than educate
• Technology can be used just because it can be, rather than being the best way to present the material
• It can teach students that learning doesn’t require perserverance or critical thinking, rather being able to connect new information with what they currently know
• It causes students to have fun and provides motivation to persist for longer periods at the activity and the learning becomes incidental to them compared to the fun but they are still learning
• Teachers need to make more effort to monitor what the students are doing as there is more opportunity for discipline issues to arise such as swearing or harrassment.
• The software has to be stored on the computers and could be used by students rather than doing their currently assigned work.

Over all, research and studies have shown that edutainment software can help promote methods of learning to students and increase their learning skillset but teachers need to still use the appropriate delivery medium for the content they are teaching and not just rely on using technology for it’s own sake.