Week 4 Reflection

 

The badge for the game!

            This week was fun. We all were supposed to create a game that went along with our blog. I had a mystery sentence that didn’t fit in my blog. Only a few people found the mystery sentence. When I created my blog this week, it was after the Seahawks had lost in the Super Bowl. It was on my mind and how someone could have called such a bad call! I’m over it now. Seahawks aren’t even my favorite team, I’m more of a Bronco’s fan. I was rooting for them to win, because they’re basically our neighbor in Alaska. Anyways, I had a sentence talking about the bad call and how they should have won the Super Bowl. Where this was a fun mystery game to do and made people who played the game read my blog, I had a very difficult time giving the winners their badge. I think next time, I would have everyone write their email address in the comment box. A slight miscalculation on my part. Whoops! So hopefully with this reflection, people can save the image of the badge and upload it to their blog. If not, I learned a valuable lesson.  I played some other games that my colleagues made on their blogs. I enjoyed the Jigsaw puzzle Theresa created. I love making puzzles and to have one online, plus in the correct direction was so much fun. I played a hangman game, but was confused on how to play or win. Some blogs I read didn’t have games, so that was a little disappointing.  I liked reading about the different views and ideas from this week, but also having a bonus to play a game at the end.

            This week we explored issues we have had from parents on differentiation and gamification. I noticed that there was a theme from our views this week. Communication is key. Parents haven’t had any issues or questions and concerns on differentiation. They do have concerns and questions on gamification. I read about parent workshops, inviting the parents in to witness an everyday activity, get to know what their child is doing in the classroom. I also liked the idea of having the students pick the styles with their parents on how to present a project to the classroom. This gets the parents involved and also sees what their child is doing in the classroom and helps them prepare for their presentation.

            Parents only want what is best for their child. I don’t know of any parent that wakes up in the morning and says, I’m going to make my child’s teachers day awful and disagree with everything they are doing, just because… This doesn’t happen. When parents have a concern, there is usually background knowledge they do not know about. Especially when it comes to games. We see games in the community as a fun entertaining thing to do. We also see games that are the “cause” of violent acts of crime. This might not be the case, but a lot of parents believe the violent games make people enact violent crimes. I do believe it depends on the game, but MinecraftEdu is different than Minecraft. There’s a survival mode and a creative mode. With MinecraftEdu teachers are in the game and observing their students. I think if we were to do a parent workshop on the (online/gaming) tools we wanted to use in the classroom, there wouldn’t be so many concerns or questions. If we communicate and provide examples to parents, they will more likely be on our side and want their student to use these tools. If we leave our parents in the dark, they will always question our ideas. Parents grew up a certain way. Some of them grew up in boarding schools, religious schools… where no games or fun different learning tools were heard of. We need to remember how the parents we communicate with learned and what they grew up with. Yes, things are changing, but with change we need to give everyone a chance to learn about the new tools and become familiar with them.