Technology In The Classroom

Our assignment was to find and select an educational game for use inside a classroom. Our class was randomly assigned into different groups. Luckily for me, the two others in my group were Elementary and Early Childhood majors. It made selecting a game much easier since we all deal with children within similar age groups.

While searching for an online game, we all came to a consensus on what game we will be using. We decided to choose a math game and the game we decided upon was Brain Racer. We chose Brain Racer because it challenged the students to solve mathematical problems as fast as they could in order to win the game. On a blog by Ashley Wainwright on securedgenetworks.com, she states that, "Technology is everywhere, entwined in almost every part of our lives. It affects how we shop, socialize, connect, play, and most importantly learn." We chose this game because if we were to implement this into our lesson in the future, it would allow the students to have fun while learning how to solve math problems.

Based on our standards after choosing the game, we had to grade the game using a rubric. Before starting, we looked at the examples provided on Moodle on how to start up on our rubric. We tried to follow the examples but it was difficult for us as we did not know what to include in the rubric. We tried adding things in and removing them until we finally decided what we wanted to grade the game on. According to Utah Education Network, "A rubric defines in writing what is expected of the student to get a particular grade on an assignment." In our case, a rubric in writing defined what is expected of our game in terms of potential use in the classroom. Is it educational enough and safe for use in the classroom or not? 

During this project we used a couple of communication tools. We used WhatsApp and email. We created a group chat so communicating would be easy for us as we all have different schedules and we could not meet up during the day due to class or work. For presenting, we were going to use Powerpoint, but we were prohibited from doing so, so we chose Prezi instead. Prezi is a free online presentation tool, but we had problems using it. We resorted to using Keynote instead. Keynote is a presentation tool developed by Apple and the convenient thing about it was we could use our phones as a remote to control the presentation. 

This assignment introduced me to tools I have never used before. I myself am not an Apple person as I had only recently started using an iPhone. It is very useful how things such as Keynote exist as an alternative to Powerpoint and it is very convenient as it is accessible on my mobile device as well. In the future I recommend using Brain Racer as a way to help kids develop their mathematical problem solving abilities. It is fun and challenging game and I myself had a bit of trouble solving some problems. It really challenges you to think, learn, and have fun all at the same time.

References:

http://www.securedgenetworks.com/blog/10-Reasons-Today-s-Students-NEED-Technology-in-the-Classroom

 http://www.uen.org/rubric/know.shtml