Role Playing Games are fun and do cause you to think, but do they really have purpose in the classroom? So on March 25, in my ECMP 455 class we had a presentation on RPG and other educational games and their purpose in the classroom. Regina Public has made a teen second life for their students which some teachers are embracing. Here is a video about it…
So I explored second life for a couple hours as I cannot become a member of this site since it is protected by Regina Public. I can see the good things within it such as having the ability to have guest speakers from anywhere, having students work collaboratively with one another to build a replica of something (an example being done, where they made a Batoche replica on the site after visiting it.) But with technology we have to be careful of the assignments we are giving our students and what are they are actual doing with it, am I right? With second life there is some technology problem solving, but my question is what are we teaching? Are we teaching how to drag, drop and expand or what is the explanation we are asking our students to give with these assignments. I’m sure we all had the experiences with educational games where we are just drag and dropping and not actually learning and retaining in a lot of cases these are the websites we see.
I personally love RPG such as (sims or GTA, I’ve been obsessed at times) but, I wonder will the students loose interest like I did with these games? If we push programs like RPG are we in danger of making this boring or not giving students enough variety in our teaching strategies. I think the answer is if you do use these types of programs remember moderation, its not quantity but quality.
In our second half of the class we had Sylvia Martinez speak to us about the potential for gaming in education, which besides the google application class I think was the best speaker we had. She worked for Xbox and saw the potential of the gaming as for educational purpose and decided that in many cases the games that were deemed educational were not in fact but sadly drag and drop games where you didn’t need to know a thing (which I totally agree with). So she decided to take up the cause and is now making and promoting real educational games. Which involve strategies and problem solving skills which have the students really think about what they are doing and not aimlessly trying to solve a problem. A great example of this is when I interned in my school there is a program called tux type (which I have see) and in the game section of Tux there are games where if you have to hit certain letters on the key board to pass a level, students figured out strategies to excel at the game without knowing the skill. Some would hit all the letters on the board at one time, some would continue just but watching one column and pressing the single letter that came that one letter. Most students abused the skills these games were trying to teach.So before buying into any educational games check them out and think what are the students really learning here?
3 responses so far ↓
Marnie // March 30, 2009 at 10:25 pm |
Hi Rochelle
I am glad you mentioned the Teen Second Life project that Erik spoke to you about. I was involved in helping that project get going.
Ou are ablsolutely right – we always have to be careful about what assignments you are giving the students. This applies to paper pencil tasks in the real world and yes, it applies to projects like this one in TSL. You can check out the website for this project http://tinyurl.com/slculture
You will notice that we planned a project that met the curriculum objectives. Because the students were working in a space that they found engaging, they applied more time and effort than they would had this been approached in a more traditional manner. As I am sure Erik shared, the learning that came out of this project was deeper than he had ever observed when he taught it in a more traditional way. The evidence of student learning were presented in digital artifacts such as the student blogs which are fascinating to read (also linked to the above project link).
Is it a game? Well having spent all this last weekend “in world” at The Virtual World Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference on my own time, I can tell you that I didn’t see any evidence of gaming. Ther were people from all over the world at this “conference”. Creativity, collaboration, communication and community building, that is what I have seen and experienced. Second Life provides a virtual physical space for learning and interacting.
What is the benefit for the students? From what I can see, if you have good tasks designed, then the students are engaged. Because this space draws on multiple forms of literacy practices, it is not just the verbal linguistic student that excels. We have watched the students with significant learning disabilities excel here and that provides them with a boost that many other traditional means of teaching and earning do not.
In the end, as I am sure you have discussed in your class this semester, technology alone does not make the difference. It begins with good teachers designing good learning tasks. Technology can leverage those to the 9’s. But technology can not make up for that deficit.
Hope you have learned well this semester and can apply it in your future work!
Marnie
matt // March 31, 2009 at 9:24 am |
This blog’s great!! Thanks
.
Making Strides in Second Life « Search 4 Understanding // April 14, 2009 at 6:52 pm |
[...] pre-service teacher recently commented in her blog after a presentation of one of our recent projects. She asked, [...]