Playing games can keep you ready to
embrace change. By playing games with
technology, you keep up with what is going on and what technology your students
are exposed to. I think that if you keep
up with changes, through play, you will be more accepting of change. Learning new things in increments is much
easier than all at once. So, if you keep up with changes, it is much easier to
understand and adjust than someone who hasn’t been aware of changes for years.
In the session “Twitter Vs.
Zombies,” Pete Rorabaugh talked about how
the game players were all teachers and students. As a teacher, it is important to learn new
things. If you keep learning new things,
you will remember what it is like to learn something new. It’s important for teachers to understand the
frustrations and/or fear students may feel when learning something is
difficult.
In the session “Getting Started with
Game Based Learning” with Alice Keeler, she discusses where in video games
there is a culture of learning from failure.
This encourages risk taking. In a
classroom, often failure is feared.
Students do not take risks because they may fail and feel
humiliated. Whereas in a game situation,
when you do something wrong and die, you learn what you did wrong and try to do
better the next time. This is the culture that classrooms should have. When a student says they don’t know how to do
something, I tell them something I learned from another teacher. “If
you knew how to do everything, why would you need to be in school? School is
for learning.”
In our text A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of
Constant Change by Thomas and Brown, the Harry Potter books are
discussed. I never thought about it, but
every Harry Potter fan has amassed a huge amount of information of everything
about the stories. They didn’t learn all
this information with flashcards or by trying to memorize. They learned it by being engrossed in the
story. They also learned by interacting with others
about he story. This is the type of
learning we need to foster. (Although, understandably, not everything we need
to learn is as interesting as Harry Potter, but it’s a good goal.)
