Video Games in Teaching - Lessons Learned

Check out this great blog with tips on how to effectively integrate video games into the classroom.  I have personally used some of them in my own classroom and really enjoyed them.  Many of them are for ancient civilizations found around BBC Primary History.

Video Games in Teaching - Lessons Learned

Hello Web 2.0! Nice to meet you.

The Web 2.0 environment has opened the door to many new free Web-based collaborative tools. Below are some of the tools that I use in my classroom or have explored for use in the classroom setting.

Tumblr makes it effortless to share anything you find or create. Post text, photos, quotes, links, dialogues, audio, video, slideshows, and more. You can create private posts or entire private blogs, and then invite friends, family, or co-workers to view or contribute. Tumblr even allows your audience to submit posts for your approval!

Glogster EDU Premium is a collaborative online learning platform for teachers and students to express their creativity, knowledge, ideas and skills in the classroom. A Glog is created using a very easy to understand, drag and drop interface that is relevant, enjoyable, and scalable for students of all ages and learning styles. A Glog is an interactive visual platform in which users create a “poster or web page” containing multimedia elements including: text, audio, video, images, graphics, drawings, and data.

Jing gives your students the information they need, when they need it. Use Jing to record your feedback as you grade papers, or take a snapshot to share with your class. Your students can even use it to collaborate, or ask questions!

Edmodo promotes anytime, anyplace learning. Functionally, it allows teachers to post messages, discuss classroom topics, assign and grade classwork, share content and materials, and network and exchange ideas with their peers - but in reality, it is so much more. Take a peek at some of the unique ways teachers are using Edmodo to make their classroom a community.

VoiceThread allows for group conversations to be collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. All with no software to install. A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.

At first I was unsure about how some of these tools would be used in the elementary classroom, but then I explored some more and saw the wealth of affordances they offer. All of these Web 2.0 tools provide you with an education version or the ability to make material private to protect children. All of the tool environments are very easy to navigate and manipulate. The interfaces are set up in a logical order that is kid friendly and similar to interfaces they use in their free time and provide help for the users along the way to enrich their material they are presenting. Due to this ease of use, I can spend all my time on the objective and not spend an entire class period teaching the tool. What I love best about these Web 2.0 tools are they they give a voice to every student in the classroom, not just those who will raise their hand because they are comfortable in front of the group.

I look forward to finding more ways to integrate these Web 2.o collaborative tools into my instruction. Do you have any ideas on how to best integrate them?

Wed-Based Learning

Today classrooms are not just located between the 4 walls of your room or even your school. Last summer I became fully aware of what Web 1.0 referes to which, according to Berners-Lee, could be considered the "read-only web." In other words, the early web allowed us to search for information and read it. There was very little in the way of user interaction or content contribution. I planned the Dig It! You be the Archeologist web based project to use this type of Web 1.0 atmosphere.

For this project a teacher, before the project start date, would create their own archeological dig site with organic and inorganic “artifacts” either in a storage bin exposed to the elements or in an area of at least one square foot grid of their schoolyard or other location populated with “artifacts”. Schools will also post their items for others to discover electronically after they are left for the school year. Students would post a sketch or pictures of the items they uncovered and allow others to predict what they are and what they could tell about our civilization. Once a written guess with reasoning for what the item is and what it tells about our civilization is submitted the web master will post the real answer of what the “artifact” is. The Webmaster will also post a sample set of “artifacts” for classes to practice with before they begin the project. This is similar to PBS's Arctic Journey.

Now that I have more tools in my designer tool belt I can see various ways that this project could be better implemented using a Web 2.0, or "read-write" web, platform. The project could be based in a wiki to allow for various ideas and reasoning for artifacts to be shared and built upon. You could also have a discussion board where you can post your idea and then allow registered users to comment on whether they agree of disagree.

Benefits of a Web 2.0 platform- Provides ongoing conversations about the artifacts. this would allow for deeper thinking in the ways of challenging or justifying ideas and reasoning.

Challenges of a Web 2.0 platform- The website creator loses control over the content.