Spring Games

May 28th


It has been a busy spring! In the midst of it all, we have been exploring the concept of gaming in the educational environment. It is an interesting conversation. As with any curricular tool, games need to have a purpose and enable the learners to engage in the subject in ways that create layered learnings. A quick email to our Gaming Group seemed to be an appropriate blog post.

Dear Gaming Explorers,
I’ve been gathering a bit of info since our last meeting (way back in March). Hopefully we will have a chance to gather and continue the discussion, set some clarifications/guidelines, and explore the engaging possibilities.

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?p=1762

Warlick’s current blog is on Games for Change, which seems especially relevant given the Global Classroom workshop we attended at Seattle U last week. I have been putting the games on Moodle (hidden at the moment) and will link to the resources from the World Affairs Council. I’ve also done a bit of exploring with second life – though it keeps crashing on my laptop (interesting??) and runs sluggishly on my lab desktop. Discovery Education (United Streaming) has a very interesting blog on Second life http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/secondlife . I have also added to my delicious site resources for exploring Second Life http://delicious.com/vbutler08/secondlife The gaming site is http://delicious.com/vbutler08/gaming_group I’ve added World Affairs to my network and they can be accessed at their delicious site http://delicious.com/globalclassroom

Thanks! Feel free to add to any of my bookmarks. I made a wordle of my tags. If you have a chance play a bit with Wordle http://www.wordle.net/create

Reflections - organization, conversations, writing

I have been going through an organizational phase - documents, moodle classes, to do lists, tech tracking documents, moving piles of reading material that I know is worthwhile to dip into at some time......


Reflections haven't been in form of blogging these past few weeks but in conversations. I love showing people around our school. Seeing what we do through someone else's eyes affirms the connections we strive to make on so many levels. These past weeks I have spent time with the Digipen representative. We ambled around all the buildings and he noted the art, the music, the spaces, the tone, the dynamic of the students. We talked about the ideas of programming and gaming. How do we make that relevant to the students experiences? Can we let it get messy?