We all know that for a very long time our primary and secondary schools have been using traditional methods in teaching various fundamental sciences and subjects including foreign languages. Historically, one-to-many (teacher to students) and many-to-one (students to teacher) have been the core underpinning of our educational system universally.
More recently, schools have turned their focus to many-to-many approach (students to students) thus encouraging vigour interaction between students themselves. Moreover, we must admit that effectiveness of learning greatly increased with the invention of Internet i.e. specifically designed learning systems that allow in-class learning by using information technologies. Online education has been widely used to imply learning via World Wide Web i.e. Internet communication.
In the case of the class, today’s technologies allow teachers and administrators to easily control what online materials kids may or may not use during the educational process. A heavy use of restricted IP addresses is a common practice.
However, outside the school students usually feel more free to go online and indulge themselves in excessive online entertainment such as online games, chat rooms, forums just to mention few. Some may argue that kids spend too much time on the Internet which may cause slowing down their progress in studies as compared to their class peers.
With exponentially growing numbers of online communities such as social networks, online gaming etc. kids are increasingly getting more vulnerable to the hazard of not using their time effectively on preparation for classes unless, of course, their parents deliberately choose to have a strict control. But hypothetically speaking, this may lead to a series of negative consequences including lower receptiveness, inability to manage own time and at worst addiction to useless gaming activities.
Combining education and entertainment we now can make learning fun, entertaining and game-like. Therefore, they coined a term edutainment that implies integration of both education and entertainment (amusement) elements to be delivered in one single package.
It won’t make any sense to decide upon which methods, traditional versus contemporary (IT related), schools should better use as they always need to complement one another. What seems more relevant is to continue the practice of making learning fun and entertaining because there is no doubt that this way students increase their receptiveness and learn more effectively at any level of our educational system. At last, this type of education may eventually solve a problem of kids fighting their parents for another hour of playing 'world of warcraft'.
