Educational Gaming

We started off with the Demonstrations- that of Hot potatoes, Softchalk and Youtube.

Well, i would say that the usage of such ICT tools are indeed useful especially in getting the attention and interest of our students. Hot potatoes to create useful worksheets online, and softchalk to double as a 'online web page' as well as the portal to create worksheets.( only that we have come to known that softchalk is indeed rather steep in price) However, i really do wonder if we( or should i say I) would eventually be the ones using these applications in school? Maybe i would, maybe i won't. There seem to be much to grasp to use these applications, and that is on top of the workload of an average teacher. Then again, should we not kick start the trend of using the ICT, we might well be out of touch with the students or with other more 'competent' teachers, or be labeled 'antiques'.

Youtube on the other hand, could be another source of ICT which is so commonly used around the globe, by all people from all woks of life and all ages. It is easy to use, and popular among students- what more can we ask for than not needing to teach the students another something they might need to know to facilitate the doing of the assignment. Indeed what i would prefer in an ICT tool- convenient and attractive. Lets take it that the students will use Youtube appropriately though.

Both this week and the last, the class was mainly revolving around educational gaming. It was all fun. But it did struck me, especially today , if we are indeed learning from the gaming, or from the reflection we do every time we think back about the game. For example, i was caught up with the excitement in not letting Dafur get caught by the militants. it was only till after the game, did i realize that this is actually a very real situation which may seem very far from us- That such 'excitement' might well be going on in other parts of the world. Just today we got our turn on the Wii where we 'performed' a surgery. Thrilled at this new gadget and the game itself, i think i tend to lose touch of what i can learn from this- instead, i was focusing on completing the task(game) or clearing the level in order to proceed. Then the reflection/realization sank in while we moved on to the other games.

Could it be that we had learned nothing from the gaming, but we gain a great deal from the reflection which follows?

Does addiction to gaming change the purpose of educational gaming, or is there really an addiction to learning?