I work as the K - 12 Instructional Technology Coordinator in rural school district. We have roughly 120 students in each grade. I spend my time helping students to use and integrate technology into their lessons as much as possible. A lot of the teachers are making great strides compared to where they were a couple years ago, but the reality is that most days the classrooms and lessons across the district are quite traditional. So in my work in the classroom I find myself somewhere between a conventional approach to learning (like we'd measure with a standardized test) and an idealistic vision of where we need to be (that I gain largely from listening to people who no longer have to teach the masses on a daily basis). I do what I can to move toward the ideal, but I often experience frustration as I bump against the boundaries of the traditional system. So for this second to last course in my master's program, I took the opportunity to look for common ground between those two worlds. I hoped to do this by focusing on games. Gaming has been a personal interest of mine all of my life. For over 30 years I've gone through phases of traditional gaming, computer games and game design. Now much is being written about gaming and education, but it is usually not something I have been able to put into practice. That was the overall goal. I started out by reading the book that's often named as a classic in this area--What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning. I also explored some introductory lesson plans that incorporated games and I talked to my instructor, Dr. Jeff Kupperman, about some possibilities of bringing in my own game creations. I found the book fascinating and I had some encouragement with the lessons and activities that followed from it. For this project, I started with a summary of the most important concepts that I discovered from the book. After that, I explain three activities that I created for use in the classroom. I summarize the insights that I gained from each of them along with related thoughts for further exploration. Finally, I summarize my conclusions and point out a few questions that I hope to answer in the months and years ahead. |