Some of the takeaways for me about video games, that I hadn’t thought about(not being much of a gamer) are that : players receive rewards for achieving a level and can advance to the “next level” when they complete something. They put in the amount of work it takes to advance, and then they want to move up.

I was thinking aside from the “entertainment” and engagement discussion–do we let students “move up” a level when they complete or master things, or are we holding them in place until the rest of the class gets to the “next level” also. And if we are, isn’t that doing them a disservice? And in our classrooms, no matter how engaging, instead of rewarding them for having “completed the level,” are we asking them to wait until everyone else completes the level also?

Now, I would say that in a video game, when kids play together and are waiting on another player to “finish”, they are learning because they are watching or helping or coaching, generally, though sometimes they are just bored, while waiting. But are our students helping or coaching others, or just waiting?

I was reading about the Charlotte Mecklenberg public library which has an avatar character on Second Life (article in SLJ)–I may be blurry on the details, but I don’t necessarily think as a librarian I need to be an avatar to engage students. But I do think this technology that our students use daily has something to say to us in schools(and school libraries) about how students today are learning and will continue to learn.

I had this same sort of debate in my school over note cards for documenting research. I feel we should be teaching students to highlight print outs, or use sites like del.icio.us or Google Notebook, or a myriad of other electronic note taking strategies rather than teach them to use note cards with the exact note card format, because I think those are the methods they will naturally be employing, and we should give them the best tools for managing their process. I do think many(most) teachers have moved away from that strategy.

Anyway, my point here is that we need to teach students strategies that will fit into their ‘real lives’ if they are going to really be life long learners. And maybe from video games, iPod use, text messaging, etc…we can take larger lessons of how they are used into the schools and think about what they teach us about our students.

Thanks for the fascinating back and forth discussion!

After riding the cable cars in San Francisco this weekend, I was amazed at the joy and enthusiasm of the drivers. One man kept saying, “I love my job!”. Partly because you could tell he was enjoying interacting with the riders but certainly his job requires gumption and is highly monotonous. He just didn’t see it that way.

I don’ t think we’ll be able to convince all kids to adopt this attitude but certainly we’ll have fewer problems if we continue to strive to incorporate a greater variety of instructional strategies but equally as important, extract those portions of the curriculum that are most relevant. We are fortunate in Saskatchewan to have a certain degree of autonomy that we can make some of these decision at the classroom level.

http://tinyurl.com/34nwb7

=) SCOTT