Games in the Classroom (or Library)

Julie Williams

Schwartz, K.  (2013, September 13).  How Schools Design Classroom Games for Learning.   
 MindShift.  Retrieved from: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/09/how-to-design-classroom-
 games-for-learning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&
 utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29

Summary and Thoughts:

This is a really interesting concept.  What strikes me is the Quest to Learn schools.  I have worked in public education long enough to know that a change like this would be difficult to start in an established school.  There are already too many variables…one being veteran teachers who have seen it all and don’t want to try another thing or only have a few more years til retirement.  Big changes like this almost need brand new schools with teachers who are onboard from the very beginning.  I definitely see the value of games and would love to see some of the games they have designed.

This article is about using games in the classroom.  How could we use games in the library?  Would we tie in with games a classroom teacher was using?  Develop our own?  Good food for thought and a push to think out of the box and be creative.

 

Lowering the voting age: Children’s choice awards are a great way to get kids excited about reading

Von Drasek, Lisa (2012). Lowering the voting age: Children’s choice awards are a great way to get kids excited about reading School Library Journal, 58(5), 38-40.
submitted by Kathryn Whitehouse
   
    Some years ago, I performed a volunteer project of creating and administering a California Young Reader Medal contest. I read the nominated picture books to each classroom over a 5 week period-- one book per visit. At the sixth week I passed out ballots. I created paper ballots with color thumbnails of the book covers and I verbally described each book to remind the kids of the story. I collected their votes, tallied them, and announced a winner. It was a fun project for me, and an engaging project for the kids.

    Von Drasek repeats this experiment every year for her New York City elementary students, and has never found the experience to be anything less than impactful. Students are thrilled to be consulted for their opinions, bring enlightened discernment to their deliberations, and take ownership of the process. They eagerly await the award announcement to see if their choices matched the award results. But Von Draske sees an even bigger payoff in how these events support the Common Core by encouraging critical thinking. Van Drasek also finds these events an obvious avenue of collaboration with teachers as they use the both the content of these nominee titles ( for language arts and social studies connections) and the voting process (for math and graphing connections) for deep curriculum support. She also finds teachers appreciate working with newer quality titles as a pleasant break from older titles, and are invigorated by their students’ intense engagement. Many states offer young readers’ choice awards (including California). But schools could easily customize an event to support their curriculum and examine nominees from Caldecott, Newbery, Geisel, Belpre, or Coretta Scott King.   

If I were to repeat my previous project and had only one day to accomplish this activity, I would consider something different. I would employ as many readers as classrooms. Each reader would visit each classroom to read his or her book. In an hour, a classroom would have had four visitors and have had four nominee books read aloud. The students would then vote using a Google forms survey instead of paper slips. This could be done on the teacher’s lap top one at a time, or with laptops in the classroom. The survey results would already be collected and ready for sharing. On a practical level, it would be done one grade at a time. 

But I much prefer Van Drasek’s less hurried approach for its ability to impart varied and significant curriculum connections over a longer time period, and for its ability to sustain young readers’ interest.

Stephen Downes answers questions on Education and Technology

Crompton, Marc

Downes, S. (2012, September 16). : Questions from students at Vancouver Island University. Half an Hour. Retrieved September 16, 2012, from http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2012/09/questions-from-students-at-vancouver.html

I will admit that I'm getting easily distracted from the required reading for this course and apologize for posting so often on the blog, but it seems to be the best communication stream for this type of thing in our course.  Part of the reason I'm getting distracted is that I'm following up on interesting links in the text and then interacting with those leads in some way.  This is not one of those links...

I took a brief look at my Twitter feed this morning and stumbled upon the article cited above.  A number of students in an Educational Technology programme at a nearby university wrote to Stephen Downes on the opposite end of Canada and posed some interesting question that dovetail nicely with some of our discussions and readings.  Rather than responding individually to each student, he posted a broader response in his blog, Half an Hour.  The topics discussed include collaboration and competition in education, defining appropriate student behaviour online, impact of cloud computing on learning, equal access to technology and evaluation of web content.  In addition to being a great read on its own, he has provided links to so much other great material including a video keynote he did for a group of educators in Finland on PLEs. 

Be for-warned:

• Downes values content over production value.  If your looking for slick and polished, you'll be disappointing.  If your looking for great ideas, you'll get them in spades.
• His "Canadian" analogy of clearing an ice rink for skating would have been somewhat lost on his audience on Vancouver Island.  Unlike much of Canada, Canada's south-west coast has primarily indoor ice-rinks.  I've lived here all my life and have only seen one winter cold enough for the lakes to freeze enough to be safe to skate on.  Just a little geography/meteorology lesson for those who have never visited "God's country!"  :)