Gaming in the Classroom

I’ve had a couple days to think about my last ECMP 455 class. We had Erik and Marcel come in and talked about Second Life/Teen Life and how they use it with their classes. However, their students are in middle school. I am going to be an elementary teacher and I wonder if gaming is the right thing to use in the classroom. I downloaded Second Life after class and tried to play around with it. I found it kind of silly because I had no real purpose for it and I was just walking around. In class, they did mention that it is best to have someone show you around Second Life to get used to it and see where everything is. I would need to explore this option to help understand the purpose.

Marcel and Erik also mentioned that there students were spending hours at home on homework that was based on Teen Life. That is great and it is neat to see how intrigued the students were by the use of games and technology that there teachers were using in class. When I look at my internship students, many of them didn’t have computers at home. For Erick and Marcel’s classes, did the students that worked online at home receive a better mark in the end because of the time they spent? Or did all the students have access to computers?

I think any form of technology in the classroom to help complement classroom work is a good idea. But can there be too much? For the students that loved using Teen Life for their social class, were they bored in all their other classroom based classes? What about the schools that just don’t have enough resources to accomplish this? At the school I interned in there were 30 computers in the computer lab and 11 different teachers with students. When I wanted to book the computer lab to work with the students online, it was so hard to find an open time where we could go to the computer lab (that fit in our timetable). The schools that have a computer lab and a laptop cart have such an advantage, because two classes can use that technology at the same time. I found it difficult because I would plan a lesson and then find out the lab was booked at all my available times. Also, the computer and projector could be brought into the classroom for just me to use, but they didn’t work at times and sometimes they would not pick up a wireless connection.

Anyways, back to gaming. In a couple classes I found useful games to use with my students that would help them learn something we were doing in a subject. I used it for math, science and health. The students loved the computer lab and also wanted to go in there for all subjects.

The second part of my ECMP 455 class, Sylvia came in to talk to us about gaming in the classroom. She had said that when looking for good games to use in the classroom, don’t search for educational games. She said that many educational games weren’t as good as others and they were usually not fun to play. I think most of the games I used with my class were educational. I spent hours trying to find good websites with games that I could use. I ended up find three good websites for math that worked with my whole numbers unit. Originally when I was planning the lesson, I just assumed it would be easy to find some good websites to use. I was wrong, I ended up spending at least an hour trying to find a website that would hit my objective and also be useful for the students.

Some concerns I have with using gaming or Teen Life in the classroom on a regular basis: Are you encouraging some students that video games are appropriate? This may not be the case at all. For example, I hate video games but maybe if I was introduced to an awesome gaming website in one of the high school classes, I would enjoy video games more now? Who knows really. Or what if the students go home and spend lots of hours on these games, would the parents be upset with the teacher? If it is educational to the students and it deals with their subjects, I guess it is fine…

I don’t really know though, I am still torn on this issue!