I found Gee's Principles, on page 54 in our textbook, very interesting. I had not really thought about learning games in this way. I chose 3 principles that I thought would be important to education. The first one is the Active, Critical Learning Principle. I believe that this is important because as an educator, you should ALWAYS keep your students actively learning. The second principle that I like is the Practice Principle. The old saying that "Practice makes perfect" is true. The only way that anyone will get better at a concept or activity is to practice it over and over again. The last principle that I like is the Probing Principle. The best way to learn is to ask questions and go through "What if?" scenarios. Students really like being able to ask many questions and receive acceptable answers or to debate about their ideas.
If I were to create a simulation for my SPED classes I would want to create a Reading and Phonics program. I would create a simulation that would use voice responses on quizzes to gauge whether or not they are pronouncing the words correctly and learning how to read. The students would have to listen to a story or passage being read and they would then have to verbally answer questions over the passage. Another aspect would be for the student to verbally answer questions over parts of speech and other concepts. I have not yet seen a simulation program like this. I have seen many Math simulations and I think that Reading and Phonics are just as important and often overlooked.
In conclusion, I think that learning games and simulations have become a large part of education these days. I have learned a great deal about technologies and their uses in this course and from this, I do not think that we will ever go away from using new technologies. I think that technology is evolving each day and there will come a day where teachers will become almost obsolete.
References
Crismond, D., Howland, J., Jonassen, D., Marra, R. M. (2008). Meaningful Learning With Technology. Upper Saddle, New Jersey: Pearson.
I definately agree with the "practice makes perfect" principle. I can imagine this would be used in simulations where students can manipulate different variable until the desired reaction is received. Of course, practice is very necessary in the subject of math as student could not fully understand why he/she received a particular answer until he/she understood how and why the answer was recieved and why it was correct.
ReplyDeleteI also chose the active, critical learning principle as my first choice. Before a teacher even introduces a lesson, I believe that a teacher should be sure that it is something that interests the children and that they'd find appealing because it will keep them engaged in the lesson and motivated to learn.
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