Reflection #1: Online Educational Game

             In the golden era of technology, all aspects of life are being built around this ever-changing and rapidly advancing science; including education. Since technology has been evolving to improve the quality of life at all spectrums, why not have it help with learning? One of the most popular and synonymous terms with technology amongst children and teenagers are games.

Online educational games are becoming extremely popular amongst the entire realm of learners. From young learners in primary schools, to young adults at the collegiate level, and even adult students in post-graduate programs, online games and the integration of technology is becoming a valuable education tool that is starting to be used more often and more frequently. Online games are becoming more educationally effective for all its users. (Garzotto, 2007).

For this project, my group had decided to use a game called “Spelling Bees.” This was a game I had stumbled on while searching for ways to help ESL learners both with spelling and typing. In this game, up to four players can go head to head, competing in rounds where they have to spell words, which a narrator pronounces, and type them out as fast as they can with the correct spelling. Every time a word is spelled correctly, that person’s beehive gets bigger. The person with the biggest beehive at the end of the time wins.

With regards to creating our rubric, one of the most difficult challenges was trying to shave down and compress our information and find appropriate ways to grade it. To help with the creation process, we listed down several keywords and concepts that we liked such as “playability,” “educational value,” and “age appropriateness,” and gave it scores like “easy,” “medium,” and “difficult,” before we refined our rubric to its final stage. We had so many ideas and needed to break it down to make the rubric simpler to read, understand, and follow. We also stumbled upon a sort of writers block in trying to figure out terms we can describe our scoring with.

Though I teach math, this game would be appropriate for my students since they are ESL learners. Even with our math lessons, I always go over with vocabulary, as I feel that by learning what the words mean, my students will get a better grasp of the concept of the lesson and the directions in which they are to follow. Since most DOE schools have technology embedded within the school’s ESLR’s, this game would be a perfect way to incorporate technology in the classroom as a tool for learning, especially in the area of language arts. (Ayuyu, et al, 2010).

During the creation of our project, the most helpful tech tool that we used was the PowToons animation creator. After browsing through some of the suggested sites and tools that you recommended, we all agreed on using PowToons. It really caught our attention and the animation was the main seller for us.

            Overall, this presentation was both fun and educational. Playing with the different sites and widgets was good for expanding our technological capital. I found the game to be pretty fun and effective at an elementary standpoint. The repetitiveness of the game might get old for older students (pun intended). The one thing I struggled with was the pronunciation of the words. It was hard for me to hear what they were saying clearly.

REFERENCES

Franca Garzotto. 2007. Investigating the educational effectiveness of multiplayer online games for children. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Interaction design and children (IDC '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 29-36.

Ayuyu, R, Cepeda, E., Gutierrez, M., et al. 2010. Guam Department of Education, K-12 Standards and Performance Indicators.  Guam Department of Education. Retrieved June 15, 2014, from https://sites.google.com/a/gdoe.net/curriculum-and-instruction/home/content-standards-1/content-standards