Engagement or Enragement?

The article “Engage Me or Enrage Me: What Today’s Learners Demand” by Marc Prensky describes the difficulties teachers are experiencing when it comes to engaging their students in learning activities. Prensky writes that the only way to engage and interest students in their learning is to provide them with technology, such as computer games, to teach the content. This is a drastic statement because teaching and learning cannot be done totally with electronics. Everyone needs to learn how to interact with each other in order to gain knowledge. This is not to say that technology is detrimental to teaching, however, when integrated into lessons it can be very helpful. Electronics should be used in the classroom setting to enhance what is taught by the teacher and to act as another mode of explanation. One example of this is creating a classroom blog. Students should be asked to post to the blog their ideas about what is taught in class, as well as respond to their classmates ideas. This would act as motivation to students because using computers is usually seen as a privilege when compared to using plain paper. Students are also interested in reading each others work and would learn from each other’s ideas. Technology is important to incorporate into daily classroom activities in order to enhance student learning.