Week 6 Reflection

Week 6 Reflection

EDET 637 Differentiated Instruction Through Technology

            This week I enjoyed looking at how games can bring differentiation to the classroom. Many of my classmates found that games provide motivation and engagement to the classroom and that games can connect to various subjects. The games or game-like materials that were mentioned or researched this week are code.org, coolmath-games.com, Get the Math, coolmath.com, Minecraft, Pokémon Go, and other games. After reading my peers’ thoughts and ideas, I think that adding games into the classroom can be more fluid and easy to do than I originally thought. At first, students need to be introduced to the game and given time to play it to learn the rules or process of the game. I will seek out time to put games in my classroom and I would like to focus on coding in my school to help students learn about the languages they might need in the future. I am going to look more into what resources are available for teaching coding in the classroom especially game-like type of curriculum. My long-term goal is to have my students code their own games to play in my future classrooms.

            This week I learned quite a bit from my classmates and I added to their learning also. I provided my classmates with a new resource called Swift Playgrounds and made a much-needed point that computer programming and coding is a very important skill for our students to have. To aksharos (not sure exactly who this is), I helped explain how coding is connected to mathematics in my comments of my blog. For Jule, I encouraged her and reminded myself how important Minecraft can be for students who need a creative outlet. Gerald presented many great resources that I can use in my classroom. I focused on coolmath-games.com, which had lots of great games, but I commented on that it would be more helpful if the games were organized by skill. Lastly, I commented on Jim’s blog in hopes of encouraging him to add not only games to his classes if that is what he desires but also game-like qualities to the classroom.