New Rating System Target’s Media’s Educational Potential

READ THE ED WEEK ARTICLE HERE

A nonprofit media consumption rating group is planning to expand their field from rating just movies, video games and websites for appropriateness to the field of education.  Common Sense Media, which is already an advisor to the U.S. department of education on issues of media and digital literacy, announced last week that it has started to develop a new educational rating system. The basic idea behind this new rating system is to put pressure on media corporations to produce more educationally directed media that will actually help build skills in children.  The company already has a free digital literacy curriculum for 4^th-8^th graders and, in addition to building the rating system, will also be to creating new criteria and curriculum ranging from educational theory to video-game making from “in-depth discussions” with a group of 20 experts across those fields.  The majority of the remainder of the article talked about how this new rating system may affect the video gaming industry and how educational games at most times are viewed as “boring” and could negatively affect sales. This may mean that the major gaming industry leaders may opt not to produce educational based games.

What does this mean for education and educators? There are some definite good and bad things that will come with it. Being able to develop games that truly hone and develop specific educational skills that will build scaffolding to generate expertise in particular areas is a very tantalizing concept. Also having the evaluative method to show that these specific games build educational skills would be great as well. Unfortunately, having these kinds of programs may also pose problems for general education classrooms.  When students have constant stimulation in a one-on- one educational setting (playing a video game) and not as much constant stimulation and less one-on-one support (a regular classroom) a lot of problems can come from that discrepancy on the learning side as well as the discipline side. I truly believe in the idea that each student learns differently and that there is a specific way to teach to each of them. If there ever was an entire educational system built upon this video gaming theory that touched on every subject it would be really interesting to see what kind of student it really creates, and where it might lead that particular student in the future. Hopefully there will be enough students who can really benefit from this type of education to make the investment worth it.