Foot: Video Games in the Classroom

I absolutely loved this article. This article is so relevant to a conversation that I just had with someone earlier today. A 35 year old deaf education teacher asked a group of young girls, as well as myself a very practical question. She wanted to know who we believed was to blame for the downfall of our educational system, is if family or educators? All of the girls believed that the lack of family involvement and motivation has caused our educational system to drastically fall, but I disagreed. She was beyond shocked that I thought teachers were the downfall of our educational system and she did not understand how I could say that beings that I am a future educator. I offered her an explanation that follows the theme of this article. I believe that too many teachers are too afraid or unwilling to change their educational approach. Lesson plans with technology and alternative, interactive activities motivate students to learn. It motivates students want to learn!

Al Doyle's inclusion of video games in the classroom is the epitome of a teacher thinking out of the box and creating a lesson that is relevant to today's digital learners. One idea that this article presented that I have never thought about before was the abandonment of education as we know it today. While I do believe our approach to education drastically needs to be reconstructed, I do not know how practical it would be to actually rebuild the foundation of our educational system, but is this a matter of practicallity or a matter of what needs to happen? The idea of a Quest for Learning is an amazing one. I could only imagine the enthusiam that would be produced if a student no longer had to sit behind a desk and listen to a monotone teacher lecture about World War I. Instead they are playing a video game, encountering the same obstacles soldiers did during this time. It gives them hands on and first hand experience. I definitely believe that this is a great idea and could be extremely useful to use video games in our classrooms.