Wow! Hard to believe this is our last technology class.
To wrap up this course, we talked about ways to incorporate gaming in the classroom. We discussed the term gamification, which outlines the aspects of games that encourage engagement and participation. The top main features of most games that draw students attention are as followed:
- Rewards – eg. badges, leadership boards, tokens
- Visual aesthetics – eg. build your own character, complex locations/maps
- Increased challenges – eg. difficulty increases as skills develop and game progresses
- Feedback – eg. demonstrates growth and progression of skills
- Guided discovery – eg. not an open ended challenge.
In our class time today, we got a few examples of websites that I look forward to exploring and will use in the future.
https://pbskids.org/games – This website is an excellent resource for teachers and parents alike. This is a good, reliable educational website that is filled with various games of differing difficulty levels and games that address a handful of topics.
beinternetawesome.withgoogle.com – This is a new resource I have never heard of before or truly explored yet. This game is designed by Google to teach internet safety and digital citizenship in youth and children. I plan to check this resource out for myself soon as I believe this is valuable knowledge for students when using technology and social media.
https://education.minecraft.net/ – Minecraft is a well-known game among youth and adults. This specific website is aimed to support educational development. This YouTube video below is produced by PBS and discusses how and why Minecraft is the ultimate educational tool in the classroom.
One final game, that we got to play as a cohort today to finish up the course is Kahoot. This is a fun, interactive quiz for a whole class. Students are required to have their own device or computer to log into the game with the code the teacher has supplied. We have used this many times throughout our program and it is a tool I hope to use in the future, as it is always a fun, yet more casual and less stressful way to test knowledge.
I would like to say a BIG thank you to Michael Paskevicius for instructing this course. Check out his Twitter page @mpaskevi.
I look forward to my ongoing learning journey of educational technology! And, another big thank you to everyone who took the time to read my blog – friends and family included!
xoxo missrose
Cover Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash