Prensky

=Marc Prensky=



Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, visionary and innovator in the field of education and learning. His website, Marc Prensky, is easy to navigate where readers can learn about Marc’s views on how to teach future-oriented skills--including problem-solving, 21st century skills and digital games based learning--as an integrated part of all curriculum. Marc's focus is on designing better pedagogy and curriculum for the digital generation, sharing new technology, video games and other highly engaging activities with educators and businesses. Prensky focuses on education from the perspective of the students, where he offers solutions for how to teach and motivate today's students and he helps educators learn to adapt their pedagogy in ways that are far more effective for the 21st century.

Marc is also a founder and creative director of [|Spree Games] (a K-12 curricular games company where the games are separated by subject, age, grade level, and standards), the founder of [|Games2train], and creator of the sites-DoD Game Community and Social Impact Games. Marc believes that video games can accelerate children’s language and cognitive growth so he encourages parents and teachers to allow children to play more games especially in today’s digital world. Marc believes that games/video games let children play with different teams online and provide skills such as observation, questioning, hypothesis, and testing.

I agree with Marc that many Americans are ill prepared for the demands of today’s and tomorrow’s workforce and instead of blaming the students, it’s important to make sure the educators are trained with the 21st century skills so that they can integrate the skills in the classrooms successfully. I do believe that young children today live and participate in 21st century daily activities that are permeated with the presence of a wide range of technologies. I like that Marc is spreading the word about the importance of technology in education and many of his writing provide insight for educators and parents on how to teach children using the different digital tools. As an educator, I like that Marc has created engaging educational online games for teachers to use in the classrooms because students do learn a lot through games. The games appeal to students for many reasons and students get excited about learning. However, I don’t fully agree with Marc on the idea that with video games children can learn positive and useful things for their future from their video and computer games than they learn in school. I understand that Marc believes that students learn skills such as observation, questioning, hypothesis, and testing when they play video games because they observe what is going on, question themselves about what to do next, test the their theory, and etc. With that said, I believe that some video games promote violence so I don’t want children to play those games, but I do agree that there are many educational games where students do learn and gain skills.