In the age of the internet education is shifting towards a new platform. A platform that works with the interests of a new generation of students. More and more lessons and learning activities have become computer interactive procedures. All in the name of progress.
Aside from the new futuristic world around us there are still age old conundrums that still require answers. How do we prevent bullying in the school system? How do we prevent children from being ridiculed for expressing who they are? But most importantly how do we maintain the realm of public education d s safe and secure place.
The answer is not by any means a simple one but once again the 21st century has opened up new doors and possibilities that are yet to be explored. In this new golden era its time to turn classroom learning into a video game. Lets take bully prevention as our prime target for the moment. If there were classes dedicated to computer gaming activities in which the students were made to use teamwork as a method of achieving success in the game it would be a lesson that would stick with the children even after they'd gone home.
Part of the storyline of the game would be that your helping kids your age who are in some sort of trouble or danger. This sets a precedent that if someone needs help then its your job to provide it to them.
Often times seminars and assemblies do not work. Its too IN YOUR FACE! The message has to be instilled into every student naturally. Its not something that can be crammed down their throats. If its executed that way the children see it as any other forbidden fruit placed in front of them. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Don't do drugs. Don't say anything to anybody that the administration would not approve of.
That's why students usually choose the peers that appear more timid to exert their frustrations onto. They know those students aren't going to report them. They know this kid isn't going to get them into trouble. And they know this student wasn't going to fight back. So by collecting all of them into a giant auditorium or getting some authoritarian police officer-like figure to talk to them about being respectful to their fellow students, your only putting a more tantalizing piece of fruit in front of them.
There are some students who feel the need to express their own depression or anger by targeting students who show apparent signs of insecurities and anxieties. But if at an early age they learned that working alongside those same students is fun and rewarding you may end up with a very different positive outcome.
You may be skeptical as too whether these digital based lessons may work but the proof is in the pudding. Its been statistically proven that children s well as adults learn at a more rapid rate with digital stimulation. To use a study in year 2000 stating that the company United Airlines reduced its employee training time from 40 hours to 18 hours after converting to a digital learning format. Looking for something even more recent? In 2012 the Center for Learning and Performance Technologies released the following Top 100 tools for learning. The top 10 were all media based platforms. Among them being Wikipedia, PowerPoint and WordPress.
Technology can revolutionize education. Because the internet is more then just a platform in which to pirate your music. And technology is a far greater tool then we give it credit for. Yes, yes. I know we have cell
phones and laptops and a million little gadgets on our utility belt but there are institutional foundations that sill haven't utilized technology for all its potential. Why not utilize technology to save trees instead of printing more literary text books? The same can be said about the wasteful tax payer spending used to purchase erasers, pencils, paper and binders. If everything was done over a digital platform it would all become obsolete. And if all students were presented with the same computers, same desks and all the same utilities this too would prevent students from finding ways to take superiority over one another.
Digital platforms can change the education system in so many impactful ways but we just haven't discovered all the ways in which we can use this new found power. But as educational gaming apps like Lumosity and Elevate start to become more popular amongst teachers, the implementation of these new found methods in the classroom will change public education forever.
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