Teachers
should incorporate online educational games into their classes. But before
doing so, teachers should evaluate the website and game. They will be checking
to see if it’s appropriate for the targeted age group, engaging and relatable
to the lesson. Incorporating an online educational game into a lesson plan can
be an asset, however it does come with challenges.
When it came to
creating the rubric, I was a little worried. I have never created a rubric
before, I have just received them from teachers. I always thought rubrics were
just a paper with feedback on it from teachers and that was it, but turns out
there much more than that. In (Why Rubrics Are So Important, 2016), “It’s not just
about student’s using a rubric as a form of feedback, but giving them an
opportunity to use the feedback.” The
unknown author means that students can reflect, analyze and improve their work
from receiving or creating a rubric. Although I have never created a rubric on
my own, working in a group made it easier to create one. We bounced ideas off
each other and helped one another complete the rubric. What I thought was a
problem was how we found a game, before creating a rubric. I felt like the
process was backwards and effected the scoring of the game in some way. It just
wasn’t random and the rubric ended up revolving around the game we chose.
“Coconut Vowels” is an online educational game
that assists students in the 3rd grade level with their spelling. As
a future, elementary teacher, I can incorporate this game into different
subjects, such as Reading and Math. In reading class students, will be
introduced to a set of vocabulary words that they will define before playing the
game. This helps students learn how to spell, which comes in handy not just for
the game, but also in real-life. Alison (Good Spelling Matters, n.d.) wrote, “Spelling
facilitates communication.” What she meant by this was that if we don’t learn
to spell words properly then we won’t be able to communicate or understand each
other. The game can also be incorporated into a math class because it counts
the player’s hits and misses which can be a good introduction to addition,
subtraction, multiplication, division, etc.
For
our presentation, we first tried the website “Canva,” but that didn’t work out
to well for us, considering how it only allowed one person to edit at a time
and it just looked messy. Because of these reasons, my group and I switched to
Prezi, which in my opinion was so much better. It was easy to navigate and it
steps out of the traditional presentation style. The online tool that we used
was Screencast-o-Matic and this helped us to easily show the class a step by
step of how to get to our game and how to play it.
It is important to
evaluate a website and its online educational games before introducing it to
students. Through this assignment, we were able to practice doing just that. We
used different technology tools to enhance our presentation and engage our
audience. In addition to that, we included
the Common Core Standards and how we would incorporate it in our classroom. Overall,
this assignment was beneficial and can be an asset to us as future educators.
References:
Why rubrics are so important (2016, August 8). Retrieved
from https://medium.com/peergrade-io/why-are-rubrics-so-important-299f624b0ed6
Bryant, A. (N.d.) Reasons Why Good Spelling Matters [Blog
post]. Retrieved from http://lifestyle.allwomenstalk.com/reasons-why-good-spelling-matters
