Math Games

Watch this trailer for a math video game for kids.

Is this a game we should use to teach children math?

Gaming and Learning

My school does not have one laptop for every kid, but I've been fortunate to have a class set of laptops every day. I set up a class Ning and have been teaching my grade 6 students the tech skills they need to have an online learning community.

I've also encouraged my students to find games that can support their learning. Some of the games are pretty good, but there are a lot of waste-your-time-mindless drivel out there. As much as I like games and believe they can in fact support learning, I have to admit that there are times when I seriously consider banning certain games from class, so I've been thinking of ways to do more with games than even just playing them.

Today, I had the kids make a strategy guide for a game of their choice. As common practice, I always make sure that I actually do the project I ask the kids to do. I find this important because I sometimes come up with hair-brained ideas that don't appear to be hair-brained ideas until I actually try to do them.

I taught them to paste their screenshots from their games into Microsoft Publisher; using arrows, text boxes and word art, they created a guide. Here is a quick screencast of how we use Publisher:

Here's the guide I made to show kids what their guide might look like when they are done:

Here's the screencast guide I made to show kids what their video guide might look like:

So how did I do all these screencasts? I use screenr. It is free and allows up to 5 minutes of recording. It's also super easy to link directly with Twitter. Here's a 1 minute intro to screenr:

When the kids are done, they publish their strategy guides as PDFs, and upload both their written guide and screencasts to our class Ning, where we can share our finished products.

I only need three reasons to justify this kind of project: It's in a context, for a purpose and FUN!! But, if you are someone who needs to check with the curriculum guide, can you imagine how many outcomes you could achieve with a project like this? 

Assessment and Technology

You can't walk three feet into a teacher professional development event without tripping over sessions that focus on technology.

But we know there are cute ways to integrate technology into everyday learning and there are authentic ways to integrate. It's mostly just cute to use a word processor to add colours to your font, but it's a hell-of-a lot more authentic if you include hyper-links for your sources.

In our mania for testing, some have decided that simply taking multiple choice examinations and putting them on a computer and rifling the bubble sheets through a computerized scanner is authentic when really this is hardly even cute. It's one of the least imaginative ways to use technology to facilitate learning that I can think of. (It's only slightly more imaginative than posting the marks on-line for parents to see)

What's a more authentic way of integrating technology into testing?

What if we could assess children while they are still learning? What if we didn't force them to focus on how well they are learning, so they could focus mostly on what they are learning?

What would that look like?

First let's agree we have to stop asking kids to show us what they know by doing things they hate.

If we want to know if someone is proficient at catching a baseball, how would we assess that? I'm just going to throw this out there, but perhaps we could ask him to play catch with a friend, and we could watch him catch the ball. Or I guess we could ask him a multiple choice question. (Okay, that was snarky.)

We can do a heck-of-a-lot better job integrating technology into our assessment practices. I believe this is where simulations come in. The military and the medical fields have used simulations for some time now where k-12 mostly has not.

Pilots use simulators to hone their skills while an instructor assesses.

Did you catch that?

The learner is actually able to use the assessment tool, the simulator, as a learning tool while the teacher is able to use the simulator as an assessment tool.

Can you remember the last unit, mid-term or final exam that you actually learned from?

The kinds of exams we give now tend to be multiple choice and they serve more as a gotcha tool than a learning tool. These are exactly the kinds of assessments that halt learning in the name of measurement. These kinds of tests are not even diagnostic assessments - that is, they do not assess children for the purpose of finding out why the student has a low score - rather multiple choice examinations are merely for identifying who scores low and classifies them as such.

This is why there is no substitute for what a teacher can see and hear when observing and interacting with students while they are learning, and the proper use of technology, such as simulations and games, can help teachers more effectively and efficiently facilitate such authentic assessments.