Monday 5th February 2007 9:11 pm
Theme: Games and Learning
This week, we introduce a focus on games and learning, in conjunction with our February 8th Public Forum at Chicago’s Newberry Library.
I am pleased to introduce posts from our three Newberry presenters--David Shaffer (on epistemic games), Sasha Barab (on Quest Atlantis) and Nichole Pinkard (on classroom redesign). We hope you enjoy their comments here, and keep an eye out for coverage after the event. (If you might be near Chicago this week, for event details see Jen’s recent post.)
For further games reading, take a look at the games channel of our Spotlight archives.
Category: Ecology-of-Games
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Comments
James Buchanan Middle School
http://elgg.net/mechelledc/weblog/
Posted on February 11 2007 12:27 AM
I really enjoyed the public forum on video games. As a middle school teacher, I especially liked hearing Nicole’s work with the children. Also, it was great meeting people that I only knew virtually. Thank you for an excellent event! I must admit, being a native Floridian I was so tempted to build a snowman in the park. If I brought my students to Chicago, I know I would have and made building a snowman into a science lesson. It was so great seeing the snow...even if only to walk through it in the park with the pigeons. : )
P.S. I wanted to also share by Google Translating the page and then hyperlinking via HTML to the home page, you can make the blog accessible in different languages. International readers would be able to travel from screen to screen in their language. This may be helpful in building, learning, and collaborating with others internationally to glean various cultural perspectives on digital learning. Albeit, it is not a perfect translation, but rather more like the gist. However, I think it could be a good tool for international educators.
Here’s an example of Spotlight in Spanish:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://spotlight.macfound.org&langpair=en|es
Kind Regards,
Mechelle : )
Susan Wade
Elementary Technology Teacher
http://highland.lcps.k12.nm.us
Posted on February 10 2007 7:38 PM
This past summer I took a graduate course in which all we did was play video games. The point was to see how video games help kids learn. For my final project, I presented a PowerPoint presentatio on Runescape. It’s a MMPG fantasy game. The graphics are very basic, but it teaches students a lot about online etiquette and safety, following directions, critical thinking, communication, and keyboarding - players chat with each other while playing.
Ironically, I overheard one of my fifth-grade students talking to a classmate about it while in computer lab. I told him I knew what Runescape was and that I did a whole presentation on it for college. He was stunned that I even knew what it was, but I told him it was a class about learning from video games. I mentioned the online safety and etiquette, crictical thinking, and following directions, he replied, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I turned someone in on the chat that was not following etiquette, and playing Runescape is how I learned the position of the keys on the keyboard.”