I’m in a serious crunch to find an aggregator that works at my school. My district has blocked bloglines, and google’s only shows snippets. I’ve not tried netvibes yet. I will have to try that out tomorrow. Needless to say, I come home and my feeds number into the 90s. That’s what I get for going to a training today on Active Directory and setting group policy on a Windows 2003 Server. The training lasted four hours, and it was four hours well spent, as I did actually learn that I had been wasting time going from machine to machine trying to ‘fix’ student stations so they would connect to the internet. Now, I can set the user group’s policy to have the proxy settings built right in. So YAY me for learning something new today!

I’ve spoken about ‘another’ new found passion of mine several times recently. For those that don’t know it is “gaming” in education. David Warlick has blogged, even did a podcast last fall, about it. I’m looking forward to discussing it this Friday with him at some point if I can catch him. So as I’m trudging through my big ole stack of blogs to read, Vicki Davis’ post on Cheryl Oaks’ TechLearning blog on online gaming just JUMPED out at me. As a recovering online gaming addict (read “Little Things that Make me Smile“), you will not see a person agree with this wholeheartedly. By no means am I suggesting that we all have our students run out and pick up the next best MMORPG or FPS. Let’s look at some of the benefits that gaming in education might have:

• Team building - in other words, social skills. I’ve played my share of FPS games. One of my favorites is a free version published by the US Army called “America’s Army“. Hey, let’s face it. I’m a teacher aren’t I? I LOVE free things!!! To be successful at this FPS game, the team must work together to accomplish the ‘goal’ for the map that you are playing on. I’ve played this both over a server and at a LAN party. The one constant was communication. We had to communicate effectively and work together to be successful. Is this not what we strive for our students??
• Real World Skills - I remember a game my wife picked up for her classroom a few years back. I wish I still had the copy of it somewhere. It was called Ice Cream Truck. If I can find it I will add the link here. The basic premise was the player had to plan the routes their trucks took, the amount of stock they put in the truck, account for costs such as fuel, tires and I believe labor. After each day it would show a chart of how well their truck was performing. Jen Wagner had an excel/spreadsheet introduction lesson posted on her blog last week. Nice way to integrate the 2 technologies.
• Critical Thinking Skills - This is the buzzword you hear administrators talking alot about. Build our students critical thinking skills!!! Apply, Create, Analyze! 3 ways that a student, of any age or level, can show how well they ‘think critically’. I’ve told you all before. I was an Everquest addict until I sold my account a few years back (made good money on that too!). I played a class of character called a monk. In EQ, my class was responsible for bringing things back to the location the group of other players I was playing with was located. We had a skill called feign death (I will let you all guess what I could do with that skill :P). When ‘pulling mobs’ (mob = monster, creature, npc-nonplayer character) I had to take into account factors such as distance, angles of approach, speed and acceleration of my own character, the mob I was trying to pull and the weapons I chose to use to wield. The monk class was a HIGHLY stressing class to play. At the end of a large raid when I was pulling, I was mentally exhausted.

I am going to go on record as saying that most, if not all, online games, be it a FPS or MMORPG, have an addictive side to it. I will say with the UTMOST caution. As we approach this meshing of gaming and education that we are careful in what we are exposing our students to. I’ve seen college age students, we’re talking Ivy League law students, flunk out because they were spending WAY too much time playing rather then studying. I’ve seen marraiges and families ripped apart because of the addictive natures of these games.

So to an extent I agree with Cheryl and Vicki. Gaming has a place in our educational system. It does allow a connection to exist with students. It might even give you the “COOL” label as a teacher. It’s worked in my favor on more than one occasion in my career. To both Cheryl and Vicki, as a gamer (I still dawdle around in Ultima Online on occasion) I will be more than happy to show you around some of the other worlds that are out there. There are plenty of things to see and do! As always…

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.