[Year 12 IT Apps] Edutainment

[Cameron Bell]

Children need guidance and education on what happens in the real world. 
They can just "pick it up" but without the guidance of adults, well - 
we've read Lord of the Flies.
You could ban and ignore fire and hope it goes away or teach kids how to 
handle it and the dangers involved.
You could ban all tv's in school because of Big Brother and all the 
other rubbish and limit yourself to the ABC only. Kids go home and watch 
Big Brother without any adult guidance and think that is acceptable 
behaviour. *Kids need adult guidance*.
You could sit down with a class and critically analyse an episode and 
point out what is acceptable an not acceptable beaviour or would that be 
edutainment?
Kids can either roam YouTube or mySpace unguided as schools stick their 
heads in the sand or pass responsibility onto less-tech savy parents, or 
we acknowledge it exists, happens, its ugly bits, its good bits and we 
help our students makes sense of it, we point out that a lot of it 
contradicts our sense of values and we, as teachers help guide the 
students into recognising what it right and wrong. For some students, we 
are the only guidance they get.
I fear a lot of the ugly stuff that happens in society is due to 
parents/institutions/governments all passing the buck, ignoring it or 
simply being unaware it exists rather than acknowledging it and dealing 
with it.
Cheers
Cameron

Timmer-Arends wrote:
> I don't know that Stephen is arguing some of the things you attribute 
> to him but I'm sure he can defend himself. There is one point, 
> however, that I can't let go.
>
> DD>...Surely our main aim is to assist the
>> students to adapt to the real world that "they" live in.
>
> If helping students adapt to the real world was all we were trying to 
> do then we would not have to have schools. Children readily adapt to 
> to most environments without the need for school.
>
> DD>...We have
>> evolved to learn by doing, mimicking and acting out.
>
> ...and that's the problem. It is exactly the reason school needs to be 
> a 'better place' (I know that's massively value-laden but let's ignore 
> it for now!) than what parts of society present to our students. And 
> if we allow too much of the dross that's part of society into our 
> schools, we will legitimate it. In this respect the Internet 
> represents a great magnifier of all aspects of society - the good, the 
> bad and the ugly. Surely there is enough of the bad and the ugly out 
> there in the 'real world' without unnecessarily bringing it into school.
>
> Regards
> Robert T-A
> Brighton SC
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