Digital Gaming Reflection

The digital gaming lesson I developed over the course of this class has helped show me how digital gaming can be a useful tool in the classroom. Since high school I’ve always enjoyed using digital games especially strategy games such as Civilization and Total War. Looking back with an educational viewpoint these are great games that teach history. The Civilization series teaches types of government, team building skills, and managing resources. The Total War series brings you through historical military campaigns throughout the world. The history channel uses the game to reenact famous battles. The most current Total War Napoleonic Empire has you command countries, armies, and navies of the Napoleonic war. Digital games can be used for educational purposes like teaching types of government, history, math, science, hand eye coordination, team building skills, and critical thinking skills. With the knowledge of the educational opportunity and the motivation aspect of digital gaming I would now be more than comfortable promoting and using them in the classroom.

This course has provided me with the positives of using educational digital gaming in the classroom and I plan to share it with the rest of my colleagues and administration. Some of these types of digital games can take awhile to play and it would be great to have them available after school in the computer lab or library for students to learn. These types of games and simulators are used in the work force today and it’s important for students to practice these skills so they can thrive in the 21st century.

Spotlight on Emerging Technology

Reflection on Moodle.
It is a great educational tool.
I can see myself using it in the classroom.

Reflection

The Differentiation Station social network has been a great resource and collaboration tool that has developed nicely throughout the course. We were able to learn with the help of colleagues. We contributed ideas and web links to resources about Universal Design for Learning and Differentiated Instruction. I can now look back at our social network site and use those resource links when it presents itself. The ideas on tiered instruction and real life examples of its use in the classroom has motivated me to add it to one of my teaching tools. The Differentiation Station also worked well to get feedback from fellow teachers on ideas and lesson plans.

This course has enlightened me on the ease of integrating differentiated instruction into the classroom. I had thought it would be a lot more effort and take up too much class time. I found that through tiered assessment, pre and post assessment, and varied assignments it can be accomplished and enrich the learning environment. Using technology in these assessments is also important because it will engage the learners, provide online collaboration, and help prepare students for the real world. I will review my students individual education plans with a means to adapt their lessons and assessments to provide more meaningful learning. I have learned a good deal over the course of this program and am looking forward to implementing what I have learned into the classroom.

Using the GAME Plan Process with Students

My GAME plan progress hasn’t had any real changes this week. I’ve started my classroom wiki and set it up to encourage student, parent, and community member participation. When I am teaching again it will be ready and in place. To keep it active I’m going to need to make sure to use it for assignments and have students post examples of their work on the wiki.

Using the Wiki and the technology associated with it will help students meet National Education Standards for students. I will continue to use the GAME plan lesson structure to create lessons and make sure that they are covering Maine State learning standards as well as NETS-T and NEST-S standards.

Revising My GAME Plan

Revising My GAME Plan

In review of my GAME plan to create a classroom wiki to use to encourage community, parent, and student communication and to create a worldly technology friendly learning environment. Over the past few weeks I’ve learned how to create and administer a wiki. I’ve also gotten feedback on wikis from classroom teachers and fellow classmates that I can directly apply to my classroom wiki. My goal for the future is to involve more students and parents on the classroom blog. I want to start adding educational links, virtual field trips, web quests, and student work to the wiki to give students educational resources to check out and or comment on in or out of the classroom. The next time I create a GAME plan to improve my learning I will go to fellow teachers for advice and suggestions on resources and their thoughts on the topic. Having experienced classroom teachers to use as a resource is an invaluable tool because you can’t learn experience in a book. And they have tried lots of things in the classroom and know what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. I look forward to continuing to further my education with these masters classes and available resources.

Monitoring my GAME plan part deux.

Monitoring my GAME plan part deux.

I’ve continued to work on my GAME plan of learning and using a classroom wiki to connect community members, parents, and students with each other to create a positive learning environment for students. This past week I met with a 7th grade technology teacher about her use of wikis in the classroom. She has been currently using moodle for her classes and is working on a VoiceThread project. She mostly focuses on moodle and has the students post discussions and homework there. She allows parents access to some of the moodle site. She also uses the wiki for students to show finalized projects that parents and students can view. My meeting with her made me think that I should have some of my wiki such as some classroom discussions only assessable to students. I’ve decided that I want to allow everyone to be able to access the blog but to have limitations for different groups of users. I want the public, which includes parents, community members, and students not in the class to be able to view and comment on a few parts of the wiki. I want to set it up so someone has to approve the comments before they are posted for everyone to see. For classroom students I want them to have more access to the site and have them able to edit and place comments on the wiki instantaneously. I now need to learn more about how to set permissions for a wiki site to be able to accomplish my modified game plan.

Monitoring my GAME Plan Progress

Monitoring my GAME Plan Progress.

Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer(2009) when referring to student use of wikis state that “If work needs to get done in the evening or on the weekend, wikis allow them to coordinate their efforts much more efficiently than sending a bunch of emails back and fourth. And they don’t have to know web authoring languages or other complicated tools to do so.” This means that wikis allow for a great deal of communication and participation and are easy to use. This is one of the main reasons I want to establish a classroom wiki for my classroom. This will provide an easy to access and use communication tool for students, parents, community members, and educators.

I found a good deal of information from the Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use textbook as well as tips for using educational wikis. I wanted the classroom wiki to be available to everyone and now need to decide who is allowed to post and or edit the wiki. A new question that I found is that I need to set posting expectations letting the students know how much to post and what not to post on the wiki.

John Ross said, “Technology provides these many opportunities that are going to pull people in.” (Laureate Education, Inc, 2009). Wikis are a relatively new invention and studnets and parents will be more excited to use these tools of communication rather than more traditional methods. I’m meeting with a 7th grade technology teacher who uses wikis in her classroom later this week to discuss her and her student’s experiences with wikis.

My research and practice of wikis in the past week made me very comfortable in creating the wiki for our community learning group project. Where as before last week I wouldn’t have felt comfortable in creating it. I very much look forward into gaining more in-depth knowledge on the use of wikis.

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Assessing Student Learning with Technology. Baltimore: Author.