Implementing Game- Based Learning in The Classroom

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 3^rd 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