Streaming Thoughts

Today, I woke up, grabbed some coffee and settled into my ritual of reading my daily feeds of news and blog posts. First in my aggregator as this post by Sylvia Martinez related to gaming and education. My comments on her post were from the perspective of professional development and how sometimes we don’t think deep enough about what we, as educators, can learn from games or anything else for that matter.

That said, next week I’m co-teaching a Gaming in Education workshop for teachers in our area. We’ve invited a high school senior (and gamer) for this workshop who will be introducing our participants to the world of gaming via a LAN experience. He will
also lend his perspective to our discussions planned throughout the session. We’ve planned a spectrum of games for our participants to
experience, but the meat of this workshop, I hope, will come through in the conversation.

I’m iming for experiences and dialogue that start subsequent conversations back in faculty rooms, hallways, classrooms and homes. I don’t mean the ones that imply that more educational games need to be created or that we need to implement games in the classroom. I plan to throw these questions at our participants. What would you add to the list?

• What level of engagement is necessary for learning?
• How can game design impact instructional practice?
• What aspects of gaming can we use to build engaging learning experiences?