Technology Student Wants & Needs Versus Reality

These past couple of weeks, our discussion forums have looked at the discrepancies between what students want in terms of technology and what they're actually getting. Two weeks ago, Katysha led a forum on how parents thought their students were getting access to a lot of technology whereas students thought they weren't getting nearly enough. One main complaint were the filters placed on internet sites. Filtering is a definite challenge to schools. Some filters cut out too many things, leaving students incapable of accessing information easily, and others let too many things through, allowing for distraction and possibly even personal danger. In addition to filtering problems, we also discussed the benefits of educational games and their use inside the classroom as a motivator for students to learn. Brittany took the discussion one step further and used online educational games as the topic for last week's forum. As with the other article, students complained about not getting to use online games enough. An interesting "twist" was that parents and administrators thought there was enough gaming in schools and something that they did not want to emphasize. As a class, we came to the conclusion that this negative response to online games could be because of the stigma attached to games as something of a reward, a distraction, or something to eat up free time. While we didn't really discuss it in the forum, the thought occurred to me that students may also have this perception about educational games (although for them it's not so negative) and thus also fuel the stereotypes. What both of these articles has shown me is the need for student input in a classroom. I think this comes at a poignant time with our lab design projects. Ultimately we are still students designing the labs; however, we are also designing the labs from an educator's standpoint. For my lab, it has been especially challenging because I want my students to have the flexibility to do and create what they want within the lab, but I cannot foresee everything that they would think of to do for community service projects. I find myself asking a lot of my friends what they would do if they were in such a class and I get a lot of the answers that I've already come up with, but at the same time, I feel like there is so much more out there and that each new generation becomes more complex and inherently thinks of more creative things.