Ken Meredith recently wrote a post highlighting what Dean Shareski mentioned in his presentation to our ECI 831 class about early adoption of technology — namely, that educational value may not be easy to spot right away, and that simply playing with technology is quite alright (and often leads to great ideas of how to use it to achieve curricular objectives).
While I completely agree with this idea, I think it’s equally important to give our students the same freedom. I try to build explicit play (about 20-30 minutes per week) into the courses that I teach. Now, I can’t always fit it in, and sometimes it takes longer than I anticipated, but it sure makes kids look forward to coming to my classes.
In my math classes, some things that we’ve done are Fun Fridays (in which I play a random YouTube video at the end of class on a Friday), encoding and decoding secret messages (in which I tend to go off on a short history of cryptography and it’s many uses), playing games on the SmartBoard (everything from Countdown, a distinctly math-ee game, to Yellow Out, a parking lot logic game) and anything else that strikes my fancy that week.
In my computer science classes, there’s a lot more flexibility, since all of the students are on computers hooked up to the net. In general, I try to show them (and give them time to play around with) at least one new tool/website each week. The sky is the limit here, and I don’t really have any particular category that the site has to fall into, so long as I think it’s neat, I show it.
Now, I know that I am not the first to use play in my math classroom. However, it’s hard to not feel guilty on occasion when a fellow teacher is walking down the hall and we’re (gasp!) having a great time in my math class… just playing around.
So, I’m curious. How do you incorporate play/games in your classroom?
I do not do enough games in my classes. However, I do play Canadian trivia when teaching History. I am interested in how a SMARTboard can be used in social sciences to incorporate specific games as well.
Comment by Dave Bircher — March 1, 2008 @ 3:58 pm |
When I used to teach math, I would try to change the regular classroom tasks anytime I could. Using technology, games, puzzles, projects were very useful (although, most students would have preferred to do more questions lol)
Most students enjoyed these activities. The students who enjoyed them the most were generally the toughest kids to teach in the classroom. It was nice to see those kids somewhat engaged in the class.
Comment by Ken Meredith — March 2, 2008 @ 2:51 pm |
Good post Dan. Who wants to do anything that is not fun? Involving games and play into our learning makes it engaging. During my internship, my grade 6’s were bored with text book drill and practice, but when I included demo’s and center based activities and games they eyes glazed over with glee and they became new learners. The challenge was that this play invoked more talking and laughing, how do we manage that? I will be fine with it in my own class, but I felt the guilt and worry of other folks assuptions/judgements of this practice.
How did we fall into this trap that learning needs silence?
Comment by Kyle Lichtenwald — March 2, 2008 @ 6:44 pm |
I include a 30 minute math games class in my schedule each week. I even have it written on my timetable as that. I think math games are a great time to build number sense, show students real life math applications and have fun with math. We play math bingo, use math games online and play cards.I keep meaning to buy Yahtze and cribbage boards. I talk to the students about how there are number patterns in games, use of positive and negative integers in scoring for cards along with the mental math practice they get. My students are in grade 6&7 and I want them to enjoy math.
Comment by Kimberly Brown — March 2, 2008 @ 10:07 pm |
We certainly do not play enough in our profession, and probably in our personal lives…I had a recent conversation with Dr. Schwier about that very topic..I have chosen, for now, to remain in elementary because I feel there is a little more freedom to play than the content driven upper grades. I was trained as a secondary teacher by the way.
I have found some of the best opportunities to connect with students and yet develop valuable learning experience are with the online games, such as Runescape (Sharon Peter’s mentioned in her presentation) when I taught grade 7.
Students create an avatar of their choice, then they must develop skills in order to advance their character’s “level”. They must trade (monetary skills) chat (spelling skills) interact with others in quests (net etiquette), access other web sites to achieve goals (literacy)… and a host of other skills.
Cool game. Too bad our computers cannot access the site anymore since they upgraded the game. Sun systems have their limitations.
Comment by Shaun Loeppky — March 4, 2008 @ 1:30 pm |