There are certain educators who use movies as a tool to teach their students. I think the benefits of this approach is that it makes students excited to learn and assists them retain information, whereas the drawbacks include loss of comprehension skills and addiction to watching films.
To begin with, delivering lessons using multimedia is advantageous because it captures the attention of the class. Students are known to get bored quickly resulting in a loss of attention whilst being taught during school hours. In Tokyo, for example, high school students enjoy when the life cycle of a fly is taught using moving pictures as they find this more enjoyable than learning it using textbooks. Therefore this approach results in more student engagement during lessons. Another positive aspect of this form of education is that it helps students retain information. Students sometimes find it difficult to remember things they read in textbooks. For instance, students at the University of Manchester reported recalling topics they learnt from a lecture delivered using movies, weeks after the class. This shows that visualizing information helps with retaining it.
On the contrary, this style of learning is disadvantageous because it prevents the development of comprehension skills, which students typically gain by reading and writing during learning sessions. For example, students in China are increasingly losing interest in reading due to the trend of teachers using movies to teach in schools. As a result students lose these vital skills. Furthermore, another drawback of teachers using films as an education tool is that they are addictive. While this mode of learning is useful for active recall, young people can become carried away and begin to spend valuable time engaged in this. To illustrate this, using multimedia for educational purposes has been banned in Korea due to the growing movie addiction among students. This mode of learning creates a situation where people become addicted to watching them all the time.
In conclusion, showing films to students for the purposes of learning can be both advantageous and disadvantageous. The pros include information retention and a piqued interest in learning, while the cons are addiction and loss of comprehension skills.