Digital Blog Post #E-EME2040

This week we are learning about software, apps and games.  Classrooms today are constantly adding excitement to learning and classwork by incorporating educational games to the curriculum.  Every subject can be explored and grab students complete attention with games such as:  Math Blaster, Raft Race Challenge, and The River City Project create stealth learning, which incorporates academic information by embedding it into the game play, thus teaching lessons and skills to the students without them even realizing they are learning.  My 10 year old son and his friends are hugely into Minecraft.  They are going to play video games anyway so the fact that they choose to play an educational one is relieving.  I do however believe that being able to open a text book and have the ability to learn "the old fashion way" has value.

One of the main focuses of the chapter is Higher-Order and Lower-Order thinking as associated with Bloom's Taxonomy, which is an educational classification tool that distinguishes between different forms of thinking.  Lower levels of thinking range from basic recall to interpretation of information and higher levels range from comparison and evaluation to perspective and creativity.  The revised (in 2001) list of thinking is remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, synthesis and evaluation.  When I was in elementary and secondary school classroom work primarily lied on the lower end.  Lessons consisted of memorization mostly:  copying vocabulary words out of the glossary, flashcards, and copying chapter outlines for study guides off of the overhead projector were the norm.  Nowadays teachers are using much more visual and interactive activities and small groups for class lessons.

As I discussed earlier, gaming has become a huge part of education today, but how are teacher to know which games are genuinely educational and which ones aren't?  In order to help teachers discover and utilize the best apps and games, Blooms classifications are used as a rubric for evaluating their usefulness.  Games and apps are evaluated for both age appropriateness and learning content.  It is widely considered that educational games and apps should incorporate higher-order learning.  According to the textbook authors higher order thinking should include complex storylines, meaningful, age appropriate characters, realword settings with complex puzzles,interaction possibilities with virtual characters, opportunities to replay the game with different possible outcomes and interesting and engaging graphics.  Most games are evaluated within three catagories:  Entertainment, which often involve violence, confrontation or first person shooting: Edutainment, which are fun and engaging but blend in academic content and purely educational which put an emphasis on learning and promote higher levels of problem solving and complex situations. 

Maloy, R., O'Loughlin, R., Edwards, S., & Woolf, B. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.