The Instructional Power of Digital Games, Social Networking, and Simulations and How Teachers Can Leverage Them

Article: The Instructional Power of Digital Games, Social Networking, and Simulations and How Teachers Can Leverage Them Site: http://education.mit.edu/papers/GamesSimsSocNets_EdArcade.pdf Authors: Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, Jennifer Groff, Jason Haas This article discusses the advancement of digital games, social networking, and simulations in our society and how teachers can take advantage of their popularity and use them to enhance their teaching. The article shares some popular examples of games, social networks and simulations that are out there and are very popular and how teachers can actually use many of them to enhance curriculum. It mentions games and simulations, such as World of Warcraft, Civilizations, and Lure of the Labyrinth. Each of these, and many more which are listed on a link, can be used and were actually designed with education of some group in mind. Lure of the Labyrinth, for instance, was designed to teach algebraic items to students. It also mentions many newer social networking sites that are actually being designed with students and teachers in mind. Sites like Diigo and Think.com are actually designed to be used in a classroom-type setting where the teacher has control and can monitor everything that goes on. These sites can be used for a multitude of applications and go beyond the simple blog or wiki in that they can be used for entire project sharing and many other things related to a classroom. The ideas also benefit from recent research which has shown the learning process fits well into these social networks because learning is a social activity. It has been proven that most students learn much better in collaboration and through more social interaction than just sitting in a classroom taking notes. Many unique things can be done with these technologies but teachers have many issues that cause them to be hesitant. As a teacher, I know I have many things that hold me back from trying some of the things I see, even though they seem like fantastic and useful ideas. My main issue is the lack of technology available to me and my students. Even though it seems that today every kid has a cell phone and the internet, that is simply not the case. It is even very difficult for me to find computer access for my kids while in school, making such ambitious activities very difficult. We must pick and choose smaller activities that don't take much time as finding a day to use computers is very difficult. I think until schools have the funding and equipment to do these ambitious things, they will be difficult to incorporate for many. Also, the lack of technology seen in our testing procedures also hampers what we can do. Very little technology of any type is used or even considered in any type of testing. It is hard to justify to parents or administrators spending time on projects that are not very similar or directly tied to getting good scores on these tests. The testing methods also need to adapt themselves to the 21st century if this new way of teaching is going to take off.