Week 6 Reflection

EdCamp was a new concept for me but I greatly enjoyed it! It was great to have such a fluid set of discussions with my colleagues. I particularly liked that there was no need to stay at one conversation than you felt necessary. The first discussion I attended was a tutorial on Scratch Coding. As I have said in the past, I feel that I am fairly good at handling technology and especially exploring new tools. Once I felt that I had the basics I moved on.

The next conversation I attended was already in progress, a discussion about how to communicate with parents and guardians. One aspect of the conversation occurred before I arrived: changing “parents and guardians” to “the home team” in order to be more inclusive. One of the larger parts of the following conversation was made up of how to encourage the home team to have reading in the home when they might not necessarily be interested in it themselves. Growing up, my family loved reading. We still do really. However, my younger brother and I enjoy playing video games. This meant that often we had to be dragged away from the television. However, if you were to look in on me at any given point from 10 to 17 years old, I would most likely have been reading. I had this conversation with the members of the group and impressed upon them the necessity of both balance and gradual change. I am of the opinion that videogames are not the devil, their a hobby, and one that isn’t going to go away. Children enjoy gaming, it becomes an issue when it is the only thing that they do. I also think that there is a bias that reading doesn’t happen in video games but that is deeply untrue. I remember my parents asking me if my brother could play the same game as me and I had to tell them that there was too much reading and he wouldn’t understand it (he was about 4 at the time). There are a lot of bad things about screens but we need to encourage moderation, not demonize them.